[Skywise]

(11-02-2017, 02:19 PM)Roger Hunter Wrote:

(11-02-2017, 05:00 AM)Skywise Wrote: It's too bad that the article is behind a paywall.

Yes, this paywall business hampers things for individuals who have no ready access to university or government libraries. That's my only regret about retiring.

Roger

Something I've been seeing a lot of in the astronomy and related sciences is at least the data is open access to everyone. Maybe the research papers are still a bit locked up, but anyone can access the data. For example, all the imagery from our space probes are freely available. A specific example is Kepler, which was designed to detect planets around other stars. And there's a lot of citizen science projects related to astronomy. Quote-unquote "ordinary people" are beginning to make real "big" contributions to the science. I mean big like more than just discovering a comet. If I had the time, I could access the raw data and start looking for exoplanets and I would get at least partial credit for discovering them. There's also the Galaxy Zoo project where a new type of astronomical object was discovered several years ago, with the prototype being named after the one who inquired about the strange green galaxy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny's_Voorwerp).

But then, astronomy has always been much more accessible to the public than other sciences.


How easy would it be for me to analyze seismological data, much less get a hold of something like seismic reflection data, and get a discovery published?

Brian