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I think that there's a mistaken perception of "ownership" (or perhaps "sole discovery"). Also, I am going to avoid some of the jargon like "democratization" and "gatekeeping", because I don't know what they mean. I find specifics easier than broad strokes.
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Let's take Gaia, arguably the best dataset humans have ever produced. Gaia produces a large amount of data that is then made available to everyone. The release day, I remember just typing in my favorite stars. What will it show! So exciting! My own little irrelevant discoveries.
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Then I led a real paper with Gaia. Who "owns" that discovery? Definitely me and my co-authors -- I felt the excitement of discovery! Also definitely all of the amazing Gaia team, the people who made Gaia happen, the European Space Agency, and their tax-paying citizens.
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Who could have led that paper, "owned" the discovery? Anyone! But the discovery not ours alone, shared with the instrument builders, software engineers. A lot of amateur astronomers make important contributions & discoveries, generally guided by teams. We build off each other.
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Example: microlensing searches for planets need high time cadence. Professional team discovers event, triggers alert. Their amateur network then contributes data, often in ways that the professional astronomers could not otherwise do. Supernova & other fields can be similar.
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The idea of a lone discovery doesn't make much sense to me. In your example, I played w/ covid datasets built by professionals. Statistician and epi amateur Gu Youyang contributed to public understanding of covid. Similarly, you can play with Gaia data, make your own discoveries!
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The requirements: knowing what questions to ask, how to ask them, and how to communicate results. Those are hard and require some training, or working with people who have training. Data access, papers (through arXiv), etc., are mostly or entirely open to everyone.
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To summarize, in astronomy, so many discoveries are from archives, in many cases from *public* surveys (Gaia, TESS, Kepler, SDSS) and in some cases from specific experiments designed by small teams. Most data is either public immediately or after one year.
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You don't get "total control", but total control and sole ownership is an outdated expectation for scientific discovery. For me, working with others heightens the excitement of discovery, because that excitement is shared. Science is built off of large efforts from others.
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… I do think there is value in going beyond this way of doing science to more ways, including other patterns of collaboration besides the one that’s emerged around institutions, big instruments and large datasets. The danger I’m flagging is it’s turning into the One True Way.
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This one way, let’s call it the Gaia way, suits a particular set of capabilities, personalities, social patterns, and modes/styles of discovery. I think many more are possible, and one way to get that pluralistic variety is to have more cheap instruments.
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