Astronomy / Galactic Structure - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Abstract

The researcher participates in large-scale astronomical survey projects, which are collaborative efforts of many institutions and individuals. Management of the raw and processed/calibrated data is handled by those projects. The researcher would like to have a better way to share the data behind the figures in their published papers with other researchers. The effort involved in retrieving and documenting the data so it’s usable by others is a barrier to sharing the data. It would be easier to share data from publications if it could be deposited to a centralized repository (institutional or elsewhere), where it could be maintained past the length of a grant-funded project. It would be very important for the data to be linked from the article in ADS (Astrophysics Data System http://adswww.harvard.edu/), so that other researchers would know it was available.