The professional courtesy when researchers collect data is to permit them first opportunity to publish. The National Institute of Health (NIH) has written up this policy. The NIH writes in their section on timeliness of data sharing
“Recognizing that the value of data often depends on their timeliness, data sharing should occur in a timely fashion. NIH expects the timely release and sharing of data to be no later than the acceptance for publication of the main findings from the final dataset.”
The NIH writes with respect to their grantees
“In general, grantees own the rights in data resulting from a grant-supported project.”
NIH has just written down what is the professional courtesy with respect to data.
In the case of the site data that Anthony Watts has collected at considerable effort on his part and that of his outstanding volunteers, the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) is not recognizing this professional courtesy. They already earlier have posted a (flawed) analysis of a subset of Anthony’s data. Simply recognizing Anthony’s pivotal role in identifying the current site characteristics of the USHCN sites, as listed in the Acknowledgements of the Menne et al (2009) paper (and the new JGR paper), is hardly adequate.
What this boils down to is Anthony Watts and his volunteers are in the process of creating a dataset to examine the poor siting of ground temperature stations in the United States. In an effort to preempt the feared findings, the NCDC have basically ridden the coattails of the work of another researcher (i.e Watts) before that researcher has had a chance to publish his findings. That the NCDC research is flawed can hardly come as a surprise since their obvious intent had nothing to do with actual science. It was an exercise in "damage control" pure and simple.
I guess all is fair in love, war and climate "science."
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