The Georgia Tech Library, specifically Elizabeth Rolando, has been helping me publish some of my simulation data on a “Dataverse” on theastrodata.org. Another possible service is figshare (Tip to Britton!). Considering that the full simulation dataset is over 2TB, this would be unwieldy for the front-end interface without some high-speed transfer program, like GlobusOnline. However, a mesh between a Dataverse and GlobusOnline could be a solution in the future to share full simulation data!
In the end, I have uploaded the metadata and reduced data from the “radiation pressure” simulation from our 2012 paper to my Dataverse. The reduced data set consists of the following items from ~60 outputs.
- Halo lists with DM and gas statistics,
- Lists of star particle properties, grouped by galaxy
- Stellar spectra and bolometric luminosities of each galaxy
- Neutral hydrogen column densities between the stars and intergalactic medium.
- All of the figures that were included in the paper.
I hope that by making some of my data public allows others to further scrutinize it, and I will try to make this a habit with future simulations. I’m very happy about publishing some of my data online, striving to practice open science. I think this completes the circle (maybe?), complementing the open-source simulation code (Enzo) and analysis code (yt).
I encourage others in the field to publish a subset (or all!) of their data after one or two papers have been published on the data. I believe that this will help push forward science, regardless of the field.