“In August the White House announced that the results of all federally funded research should be freely accessible by the end of 2025. This will be a big change for scientists in many fields but ultimately a good move for the democratization of research.

Under this new guidance, many peer-reviewed papers would be free for the world to read immediately upon publication rather than stuck behind expensive paywalls, and the data that underlay these papers would be fully available and properly archived for anyone who wanted to analyze them. As an astronomer, I’m pleased that our profession has been ahead of the curve on this, and most of the White House’s recommendations are already standard in our field.

NASA, as a federal agency that funds and conducts research, is onboard with the idea of freely accessible data. But it has a plan that goes much further than the White House’s and that is highly problematic. The agency currently gives a proprietary period to some scientists who use particular facilities, such as a 12-month period for the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), so that those scientists can gather and analyze data carefully without fear of their work being poached. NASA is looking to end this policy in its effort to make science more open-access.

Losing this exclusivity would be really bad for astronomy and planetary science. Without a proprietary period, an astronomer with a brilliant insight might spend years developing it, months crafting a successful proposal to execute it, and precious hours of highly competitive JWST time to actually perform the observations—only to have someone else scoop up the data from a public archive and publish the result. This is a reasonable concern—such scooping has happened before….”