A new LA Times article about the controversy over the discovery of a possible tenth planet. As those of you who read the original article know, the controversy arose when Michael Brown from Caltech was scooped in the discovery of this object and then later noticed that the “scoop”ers, led by Professor Jose Luis Ortiz, had visited a website which contained information about where Brown and coworkers were pointing their telescope. Interestingly, here is what Professor Ortiz had to say:
Ortiz argues he has done nothing wrong, and the data he found using the Google search engine should be considered public and thus free to use.
“If … somebody uses Google to find publicly available information on the Internet and Google directs to a public Web page, that is perfectly legitimate,” Ortiz wrote in an e-mail to The Times. “That is no hacking or spying or anything similar.”
Interesting line of reasoning. Of course the real problem is not that someone accessed the public information but that no acknowledgement of this access to this information was made in Professor Ortiz and coworkers communications. One thought I had (yeah sometimes I have those things!) was whether the fact that this information was publicly accessible mean that this information was “published” in the same way that preprints are “published” or information submitted to a database is “published?” Well probably not, but it seems we could probably construct an instance which is even closer to this “published” line. Consider that a challenge 😉
Yeah, duh. In fact, the requirement of citation becomes stronger, not weaker, when the information used public but perhaps not yet officially “published”. After all, that’s when it is all the more important to make sure you don’t mislead people about priority! That Ortiz is a bad person.
Completely agree that credit should have been given to the Brown camp. Having said that, I was shocked to find out how competitive scientists could be during my SURF on near-earth asteroids.
I worked with a group called PCAS (Planet-Crossing Asteroid Survey), from which PACS (Palomar Asteroid and Comet Survey) had split, or vice versa, depending on which group you asked. Both groups used the 18″ Schmidt telescope for observations at the time, and they would change the others’ log books and do other nasty and childish things to sabotage each others’ observations. There was a very bitter and extremely personal rivalry between them, which had started and escalated over the years because someone felt they did not get the credit they deserved over a particular object long ago. Now, I’m all for competition, but it was definitely disappointing, especially to a naive frosh who’d expected more mature behavior from reknowned scientists. I wonder how much of this behavior is commonplace in academia?