Nature
News: An Italian-led research group's closely held data
have been outed by paparazzi physicists, who photographed
conference slides and then used the data in their own
publications.For weeks, the physics community has been buzzing
with the latest results on 'dark matter' from a European
satellite mission known as PAMELA (
Payload for
Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei
Astrophysics). Team members have talked about their latest
results at several recent conferences (see
Nature
454, 808; 2008), but beyond a quick flash of a slide, the
collaboration has not shared the data. Many high-profile
journals, including Nature, have strict rules about authors
publicizing data before publication.It now seems that some
physicists have taken matters into their own hands. At least
two papers recently appeared on the preprint server arXiv.org
showing representations of PAMELA's latest findings (M. Cirelli
et al.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3867;
2008, and L. Bergstrom et al.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3725;
2008). Both have recreated data from photos taken of a PAMELA
presentation on 20 August at the Identification of
Dark
Matter conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
