Physicists aflutter about data photographed at conference

Nature News : An Italian-led research group’s closely held data have been outed by paparazzi physicists, who photographed conference slides and then used the data in their own publications.For weeks, the physics community has been buzzing with the latest results on ‘dark matter’ from a European satellite mission known as PAMELA ( Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics ). Team members have talked about their latest results at several recent conferences (see Nature 454, 808; 2008 ), but beyond a quick flash of a slide, the collaboration has not shared the data. Many high-profile journals, including Nature, have strict rules about authors publicizing data before publication.It now seems that some physicists have taken matters into their own hands. At least two papers recently appeared on the preprint server arXiv.org showing representations of PAMELA’s latest findings (M. Cirelli et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3867 ; 2008, and L. Bergstrom et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3725 ; 2008). Both have recreated data from photos taken of a PAMELA presentation on 20 August at the Identification of Dark Matter conference in Stockholm , Sweden.