The Guardian published a story earlier this week about a Belfast climate scientist Prof Mike Baillie, who is disgruntled at having to make his department's decades' worth of tree ring data available to a known climate sceptic as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. This story prompted the editor of this blog to post the above tweet. Also: "I don't see the point of curating data for the public", and "any nutter can attempt to disrupt my research".

Really? Let me turn this question round: what reason could there be for the public not to have access to publicly-funded academic research? When research is funded from the public coffers, surely it's automatically relevant to public interest?

Also, don't some of our most respected colleague science bloggers frequently campaign for increased transparency in the handling of data from, say, clinical trials? Why should that call not apply to other subjects?

Let's backtrack for a moment.

The internet has allowed communities of scientists to grow and flourish across borders imposed by geography or field of study, and to mobilise in the face of a growing irrationality in the public's perception of science. Blogs such as this one and those of its many contributors are eminent examples of this. Democratic as the internet is, unfortunately, those who feel threatened in their beliefs and values by science have gained an equal voice. Declining standards in the mainstream media have allowed an immense amount of pseudo-science to seep into our everyday media landscape. This undermines the credibility of hard-working scientists.

Last year's leaking of thousands of emails between climate scientists around the world showed just how far denialists would go to discredit the scientific evidence on climate change. The affair also highlighted the huge divide that exists between the ivory tower-dwelling scientific establishment working to understand this crucial issue, and the rest of us, who inhabit the planet and are likely to pay the price for the consequences of climate change.

A big lesson learnt from this incident was that we scientists have a battle to fight, and digging deeper into our trenches is not the way to win. While politicans and the media too have much to answer for in the current situation, this doesn't absolve us researchers from all responsibility. Only by engaging with the public can we help restore science to its rightful place in society. And being open with research results and data is an excellent place to start.

In astronomy, the advent of large publicly-funded multinational observatories like VLT, Gemini and the Hubble Space Telescope pushed data curation and access onto the agenda. Organisations like ESO and NASA have led the way in ensuring that much of publicly funded astronomical data is available to the entire community and indeed to any member of the public. The success of data archiving was beautifully demonstrated in a recent paper [pdf] by Richard White of the Space Telescope Science Institute and colleagues submitted to the ongoing Astro2010 Decadal Survey, which shows how archive-based literature from the Hubble (pictured below) and Chandra Space Telescopes now outnumbers PI-led publications.

Astronomical data are not made public from day one: a proprietary period of typically one year gives the Principal Investigator of the campaign a head start to the publication process. This period is key. Let's be honest: scientists may well say they want to learn how the Universe works, etc, but really, from day to day, they just want to win (or at least not be scooped). Wide-eyed wonder doesn't drive science, competition does. Having sole access to new data is essential to this process.

Contrary to popular belief, making datasets public needn't take away credit from the scientists who gathered the data. In astronomy, surveys and even instruments are accompanied by comprehensive descriptive papers. These then become citable by other researchers using the data for their own work.

To the outside world too astronomical data archiving has made its mark. The huge Sloan Digital Sky Survey dataset, publicly available in its entirety, made possible the Galaxy Zoo project, where citizen scientists have helped with morphological galaxy classifications - 60 million of them.

The journal article providing the original description of the SDSS is the 4th most cited paper in astronomy since 2000.

Astronomy is not a very politicised science compared with, say, medical research or climatology. But our experience has shown that being open with data is beneficial for both progress in research and public engagement with the subject. It's not about making every byte of data instantly available to everyone. It's about being clear and open in research projects about how your data will be managed and shared.

The data policy for the European Planck satellite, launched last year to study the cosmic microwave background, is unusually draconian with all data essentially in lockdown until 2012. This is unprecedented for such a mission - but as long as there is a clear policy and a timeline from the outset, there can also be trust.

I don't want to comment on this particular FOI case. I don't know a thing about dendrochronology or the individuals involved, and not a great deal about the Freedom of Information Act either. But if we scientists are going to gather on blogs and rail against pseudo-science and pharmaceutical companies for hiding or misrepresenting data and call for absolute transparency in research, we need to hold ourselves to that same high standard. Data repositories and curation require resources - but the experience in astronomy has shown that the investment is worth it, both from a purely scientific and a public relations perspective.

Yes, the FOI act is probably a clumsy and overly heavy-handed tool for obtaining access to research data, and many requests may be nothing but harassment of honest hard-working scientists. But if the "nutters" knew more about what you were doing with your data all along, they may not have wanted to disrupt your research in the first place.

Image: White et al (2009)