Open Science

Identifying the same object across different catalogues and wavelengths — matching a source in an infrared survey to its optical and X-ray counterparts — so that all that is known about an object can be brought together despite different names and positions.

The automated processing that turns raw telescope readouts into calibrated, science-ready data — removing instrument signatures, correcting for the atmosphere or detector, and attaching the metadata and error estimates that make the data usable by anyone.

The stable, unique names that make science findable and creditable — DOIs for datasets and papers, ORCID iDs for researchers, and bibcodes for the literature — so a result can be cited, retrieved, and attributed unambiguously years later.

The principles that make science trustworthy and reusable — data that is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), open archives, documented pipelines, and citable datasets — so that a result can be checked and built upon by anyone.

NASA's Astrophysics Data System, the digital library of astronomy — indexing essentially the entire research literature and linking every paper to the data, catalogues, and objects it uses, so the literature and the data are one connected web.