Today was the first day of a meeting hosted by the NASA IPAC (home of IRSA and Spitzer among other important projects) to start the discussion of the response of the astronomical data archives to the US Astrophysics Decadal Survey. Not everyone agreed on the point of the meeting, but I think it is to create talking points that connect to archives, but which could be incorporated into community science white papers. These white papers are due in February.
There were several highlights for me at the meeting today. One was Hillenbrand (Caltech) summarizing the white paper process from last decade, and giving advice for white-paper submitters. She emphasized that the white paper text should be cut-and-paste ready for inclusion in the final report. That is, it isn't like a proposal to be approved; it is like a community contribution to the writing of the report. And she emphasized that it doesn't make sense to make points in white papers that will be obvious to the committee!
One of the technical concepts that was discussed today by archives was that of science platforms, in which archives might provide compute resources or other scientific facilities to their users: The idea is to bring the code and the analysis to the data, since the alternatives might be too expensive. But (as I brought up in discussion) then that gets into the space of archives making decisions about what science they do and don't support, which might conflict with peer review, or put scientific projects under various kinds of double jeopardy. And it might mean that projects like LSST, which are doing related things, might end up interfering in unintended ways with the astronomical community and its scientific priorities. These are interesting issues to keep track of.
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