Everyone issues forth platitudes about how science should be more 'open' and, in a world of social media, it will certainly stay harder to remain closed.
A few weeks ago, a leak about a possible new discovery (for the comprehensive explanation from a member of the collaboration, see Tommaso Dorigo) set the media aflame. A preliminary document seemed to show γ-rays from a decaying Higgs particle with a mass of 115 gigaelectronvolts and the details about what it really or really was are best left to experts like Tommaso but the issue here is, will open science, part of the Science 2.0 vision, make any headway or not?
More importantly, what if the information is not released by a blogger but perhaps extracted by a journalist? New Scientist, no stranger to controversy to pump up readership, came forth with its own leak a few days later, this from a Powerpoint slideshow they apparently got by having access to an internal username and password for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector group, the complement to ATLAS. The press were rather quick to ignore the second one but the issue will remain, how open is open?
It's one thing to share private lab data but a collaboration and their reputations would prefer to exercise stronger control and verification before results are leaked - especially since, in the case of the ATLAS leak, it seemed to be more that some physicists got too little sleep and too much excitement.
