claim: An open-data citation/use advantage is empirically documented at the article and dataset level: openly available articles and datasets accrue more citations and reuse than restricted ones, establishing that the openness-to-yield relationship the dissertation studies at the mission level is a real, measured phenomenon at adjacent units.

source: Piwowar HA, Vision TJ, Data reuse and the open data citation advantage, PeerJ (2013)

grade: A

source: Eysenbach G, Citation advantage of open access articles, PLoS Biology (2006)

source: Colavizza G, Hrynaszkiewicz I, Staden I, Whitaker K, McGillivray B, The citation advantage of linking publications to research data, PLOS ONE (2020)

facet: empirics

subclaim: real


claim: Open science measurably benefits researchers and the research system, supporting the premise that a NASA mission's free-and-open data release is a policy lever expected to raise downstream scientific output rather than a neutral administrative change.

source: McKiernan EC, Bourne PE, Brown CT, Buck S, Kenall A, Lin J, How open science helps researchers succeed, eLife (2016)


claim: The Landsat program's 2008 free-and-open switch was followed by a large, documented jump in scientific use (scene distribution rising from the order of tens of thousands to tens of millions of scenes per year, and a sharp expansion in publications and operational products), so the magnitude of the effect at stake is material to NASA's mission-investment decisions, not marginal.

source: Wulder MA, Loveland TR, Roy DP, Crawford CJ et al., Current status of Landsat program, science, and applications, Remote Sensing of Environment (2019)

source: Zhu Z, Wulder MA, Roy DP, Woodcock CE, Hansen MC, Radeloff VC et al., Benefits of the free and open Landsat data policy, Remote Sensing of Environment (2019)

subclaim: material


claim: The post-2008 Landsat usage shift is materially corroborated on the publication side: the average number of Landsat images used per study rose from about 10 before 2008 to about 100,000 by 2020, confirming the magnitude of the open-data effect is large enough to justify a dedicated mission-level estimation effort.

source: Hemati M, Hasanlou M, Mahdianpari M, Mohammadimanesh F, A Systematic Review of Landsat Data for Change Detection Applications: 50 Years of Monitoring the Earth, Remote Sensing (2021)


claim: The academic-impact advantage of open access and open data is conditional and heterogeneous rather than uniform, so a bounded conditional recommendation (open release raises yield where curation, community, and identifier preconditions hold) is the warranted form, not a universal open-data mandate.

source: The academic impact of Open Science: a scoping review, Royal Society Open Science (2025)

source: Zhu Z et al., Benefits of the free and open Landsat data policy, Remote Sensing of Environment (2019)

facet: rival

subclaim: alternatives


claim: Open-data release is an institutional rule change in North's sense that lowers the transaction cost of obtaining and reusing data; the FAIR Guiding Principles supply the vocabulary that separates a bare access-license flip (Accessible) from co-arriving discoverability, interoperability, and reusability changes (Findable, Interoperable, Reusable), so the access-cost mechanism can be isolated from a co-bundled organizational build-out.

source: Wilkinson MD et al., The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship, Scientific Data (2016)

facet: mechanism

subclaim: mechanism


claim: A true access-cost mechanism predicts a distribution (download) break that strictly precedes the publication break and a disproportionate jump among new previously-unaffiliated entrants, whereas pre-existing community lock-in predicts incumbent-concentrated growth with no distinct distribution discontinuity; the upstream Landsat distribution break preceding the publication expansion is the documented empirical signature that distinguishes the two.

source: Wulder MA, Loveland TR, Roy DP, Crawford CJ, Current status of Landsat program, science, and applications, Remote Sensing of Environment (2019)

source: Hemati M, Hasanlou M, Mahdianpari M, Mohammadimanesh F, A Systematic Review of Landsat Data for Change Detection Applications, Remote Sensing (2021)


claim: Formal data citation became common only recently and informal in-text data citation far exceeds formal reference-list citation, so attribution-practice drift is a real relabeling channel that the impersonal-use and distribution-log checks are built to block.

source: Park H, You S, Wolfram D, Informal data citation for data sharing and reuse is more common than formal data citation in biomedical fields, JASIST (2018)

facet: measurement


claim: Download/deposit counts decouple from actual reuse because reaching analysis-ready state depends on documentation and infrastructure, so distribution events are not a direct transaction-cost measure and a realized-reuse cost proxy (data citation, processing-level-at-release, time-to-first-reuse) is required rather than inferring cost from the binary license label.

source: Wallis JC, Rolando E, Borgman CL, If We Share Data, Will Anyone Use Them? Data Sharing and Reuse in the Long Tail of Science and Technology, PLoS ONE (2013)

source: Mooney H, Newton MP, The Anatomy of a Data Citation: Discovery, Reuse, and Credit, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (2012)


claim: Costs are reciprocal (harm is jointly produced), so open release can reallocate cost onto the user rather than eliminate it; where curation, documentation, and funded support are thin, deposited data go unused, so the design must code processing-level-at-release and funded-user-support withdrawal and test for a negative or null ATT in any mission where openness coincided with service removal.

source: Coase RH, The Problem of Social Cost, Journal of Law and Economics 3:1-44 (1960)

source: Wallis JC, Rolando E, Borgman CL, If We Share Data, Will Anyone Use Them?, PLoS ONE (2013)


claim: A positive citation ATT is a gross-benefit estimate, not a net-welfare finding, until the producer-side cost of supplying open access is on the same ledger; that cost is documented and decomposable because NASA Earth-science data are distributed through funded data-and-information-service-center (GES DISC/DAAC) operations with an explicit, measurable information-management and stewardship cost structure.

source: Lynnes C et al., Evolution of Information Management at the GSFC Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (2008)

facet: economics


claim: The firm/market boundary logic (the make-vs-buy margin where internal coordination cost equals market-exchange cost) makes 'mission internalized the curation-and-distribution transaction' and 'market intermediaries supplied it' distinct institutions with distinct policy implications, so conflating the DAAC-hosted and third-party-intermediary channels misattributes the binding constraint.

source: Coase RH, The Nature of the Firm, Economica 4(16):386-405 (1937)

facet: identification


claim: A count drawn from a re-indexed, backfilling bibliographic database is a constructed aggregate whose coverage definition, valuation convention, and netting rule must be stated before the number is reported, exactly as a national-income account must; a placebo-on-never-treated series re-harvested across index vintages is the correct falsification instrument for index-coverage drift correlated with treatment timing.

source: Landefeld JS, Seskin EP, Fraumeni BM, Taking the Pulse of the Economy: Measuring GDP, Journal of Economic Perspectives 22(2) (2008)


claim: A constructed space-sector or distribution aggregate requires an explicit coverage boundary and gross/net (double-counting) treatment before the count is comparable, so the Earthdata/DAAC download count needs a stated netting rule for crawler, machine-to-machine, and re-pull traffic and a series-continuity check across the policy date before it can adjudicate access-cost versus relabeling.

source: OECD Handbook on Measuring the Space Economy, 2nd ed. (2022)


claim: The post-adoption rise must be decomposed via the McMillan-Rodrik within/reallocation identity into real production-boundary expansion versus re-attribution of existing publishing from never-/not-yet-treated missions; a treated gain mirrored by a contemporaneous control-pool decline (approximate conservation) is structural churn, not new output, and the frozen matching rule plus no-prior-affiliation cut does not by itself detect cross-mission re-attribution.

source: McMillan MS, Rodrik D, Globalization, Structural Change and Productivity Growth, NBER Working Paper No. 17143 (2011)


claim: A right-skewed, lagged citation count makes the observed level at event time partly a deterministic function of dataset age, so a treated mission opened at calendar T is sampled at a different point on its accrual curve than a same-event-time control; the proxy must be netted (observed_cites = behavioral_use + accrual(age, field_size, indexing_coverage)) by aligning on dataset age and differencing against the within-mission pre-trend accrual profile, or window maturation is mistaken for a behavioral change in use.

source: Henderson JV, Storeygard A, Weil DN, Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space, American Economic Review 102(2) (2012)

source: Donaldson D, Storeygard A, The View from Above: Applications of Satellite Data in Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives 30(4) (2016)


claim: A raw publication-and-citation count is a gross-output figure and welfare cannot be inferred from a single volume aggregate; reporting raw count, distinct first-author teams, and distinct institutions as parallel series, with a pre-specified divergence rule (a rising gross-to-distinct ratio post-treatment flags the redundant/duplicative-use component), applies the national-accounts discipline of netting gross output to value added before the scientific return is weighed against DAAC and curation cost.

source: Concepts and Methodologies for Measuring the US Space Economy, Oxford Handbook chapter (2026)

grade: B


claim: No-anticipation is defended with a substantive warrant (external researchers cannot publish on data they cannot yet access) plus the Rambachan-Roth honest-sensitivity framework reporting a breakdown region rather than a binary flat-pre-trend test, because conventional pre-trends tests have low power and conditioning on passing one distorts the event-study estimate; the not-yet-treated comparison identifies ATT under a strictly weaker parallel-trends requirement than a never-treated pool.

source: Roth J, Pretest with Caution: Event-Study Estimates after Testing for Parallel Trends, AER: Insights (2022)

source: Rambachan A, Roth J, A More Credible Approach to Parallel Trends, Review of Economic Studies (2023)

source: Callaway B, Sant'Anna PHC, Difference-in-Differences with multiple time periods, Journal of Econometrics (2021)


claim: Under staggered timing, two-way fixed-effects DiD is a weighted average of 2x2 comparisons with possibly negative weights, so a headline scalar can be a contaminated blend unless the group-time ATT(g,t) cells and their aggregation weights are inspected; the Callaway-Sant'Anna estimator and Goodman-Bacon decomposition are the heterogeneity-robust tools the design adopts to make cell-by-cell contribution and calendar-vs-event-time clustering diagnosable.

source: Goodman-Bacon A, Difference-in-differences with variation in treatment timing, Journal of Econometrics (2021)


claim: Citation-index (SCI/WoS) coverage is non-stationary and declining as a fraction of the literature with the shortfall concentrated in fast-growing fields, so the index regime is a second staggered treatment partially correlated with open-data adoption; a frozen linkage rule controls the counting rule but not the underlying index expansion, and differential coverage growth across sensor-class strata is not differenced out within a stratum if it hits treated and control unequally.

source: Larsen PO, von Ins M, The rate of growth in scientific publication and the decline in coverage provided by Science Citation Index, Scientometrics (2010)


claim: Parallel trends generally holds on at most one scale (levels or logs) absent strong restrictions, so the design must fix the parallel-trends scale in advance and run its leads test and sensitivity analysis on that same count/log-link scale; otherwise a levels-flat and a logs-flat pre-trend can disagree and the sensor-class heterogeneity ordering may be a functional-form artifact rather than a substantive mechanism effect.

source: Roth J, Sant'Anna PHC, When Is Parallel Trends Sensitive to Functional Form?, Econometrica (2023)

source: Sant'Anna PHC, Zhao J, Doubly robust difference-in-differences estimators, Journal of Econometrics (2020)


claim: A coefficient that clears p=0 answers 'detectable' not 'worth it'; the sizeless-science critique requires a stated loss function and a substantive (not merely statistical) magnitude threshold, and because the marginal compelled mission is the small-community, late-adopting, publication-poor stratum where the effect is smallest, reporting only the pooled average is precisely the sizeless error and the breakeven must be computed on the marginal unit.

source: Ziliak ST, McCloskey DN, The Cult of Statistical Significance, University of Michigan Press


claim: The parameter relevant to a policy that CHANGES who is treated (a mandate compelling marginal missions) is the policy-relevant treatment effect / a marginal-treatment-effect integral, NOT the ATT on the self-selected adopters the Callaway-Sant'Anna estimator recovers; offering an ATT on the willing vanguard as evidence for a mandate on the unwilling is an estimand mismatch the design must name and bound.

source: Heckman JJ, Vytlacil E, Structural Equations, Treatment Effects, and Econometric Policy Evaluation, Econometrica 73(3) (2005)

source: Mogstad M, Santos A, Torgovitsky A, Using Instrumental Variables for Inference About Policy Relevant Treatment Parameters, Econometrica 86(5) (2018)

source: Imbens GW, Wooldridge JM, Recent Developments in the Econometrics of Program Evaluation, Journal of Economic Literature 47(1) (2009)


claim: A treatment-effect-versus-baseline-propensity gradient is a standard identified object inside the candidate's own estimator family: the marginal treatment effect is defined as the effect as a function of the latent resistance to treatment, and continuous-treatment DiD gives an estimand for the effect as a function of a continuous baseline covariate (such as pre-adoption distinct-user count), so the design can in principle re-index ATT(g,t) on pre-adoption covariates to bound the marginal mission's return rather than averaging selection away.

source: Heckman JJ, Vytlacil E, Econometric Evaluation of Social Programs, Part II: Using the Marginal Treatment Effect to Organize Alternative Econometric Estimators, Handbook of Econometrics Ch.71 (2007)


claim: The de-jure/de-facto institutional gap is first-order for timing: the open-release announcement is an organizational act, not the rule-in-use, and the space-arrangements record shows the formal label and the operative rule can come apart, so the event must be anchored to the de-facto date an unaffiliated user can actually obtain analysis-ready data, and timing leads/lags off the de-jure announcement biases the coefficient path when the effective access date lags the posting.

source: Pic P et al., Outer Space as a Global Commons: An Empirical Study of Space Arrangements, International Journal of the Commons


claim: North's credible-enforcement principle applies symmetrically to the control group: a control labeled 'restricted' whose access terms are not enforced (mirror archives, third-party redistribution, relaxed enforcement) is operatively partly-open, biasing the treated-vs-control contrast toward zero, so the operative-rule audit run on the treated side must also be run on the controls.

source: Shammas VL, Holen TB, One giant leap for capitalistkind: private enterprise in outer space, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2019)


claim: A knowledge commons is held together by a bundle of rules-in-use, not a single license flag: Ostrom's design principles separate boundaries, monitoring, graduated sanctions, and nested enterprises as distinct dimensions, and the FAIR framework maps a license-access flag (Accessible) onto distinct attribution/provenance dimensions (Findable, Reusable), so collapsing the bundle into one binary averages across institutions predicted to yield opposite outcomes; an ordinal bundle index entered as a covariate is the correct instrument.

source: Wilkinson MD et al., The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship, Scientific Data (2016)

source: Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles, Information Standards Quarterly 26(1) (2014)


claim: The access-cost (North) and attribution-monitoring (Ostrom) mechanisms both predict more output but differ on timing relative to the dataset-DOI-issuance date, and this is identifiable because persistent dataset identifiers are a discrete, dated instrument distinct from the access-license event (FAIR makes Findable, via a persistent identifier, a separate principle from Accessible), so a DOI-led break versus a distribution-led break is a discriminating timing test.

source: Mooney H, Newton MP, The Anatomy of a Data Citation: Discovery, Reuse, and Credit, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (2012)


claim: The user-community boundary is itself part of the institution (Ostrom design principles 1, 3, 7), so if a mission's open transition co-occurs with the constitution of its user community (DAAC user-services, working groups, applications program), 'openness' and 'a community convened around the data' are confounded at the same calendar moment; the common-pool-resources-for-space literature treats the user community as constitutive of the regime, not exogenous, so community-formation timing must be measured and controlled.

source: Weeden B, Chow T, Taking a common-pool resources approach to space sustainability, Space Policy (2012)


claim: When randomization is impossible, the strongest quasi-experimental inference comes from design elements that break self-selection before estimation (RDD around a threshold, ITS with a control series), not from post-hoc statistical adjustment; the design's stated defense against selection-on-trends (flat leads plus Rambachan-Roth sensitivity) is estimation-stage, so it bounds the rival statistically rather than eliminating it by design.

source: Cook TD, Campbell DT, Quasi-Experimentation: Design and Analysis Issues for Field Settings (1979)

source: Rambachan A, Roth J, A More Credible Approach to Parallel Trends, Review of Economic Studies (2023)


claim: The canonical quasi-experimental remedy for a single before-after history threat is an interrupted time series with a comparison series, and a staggered DiD collapses to a disguised one-shot history-confounded ITS if adoption dates are not genuinely dispersed; a directorate-wide policy shock staggered in lockstep with adoption would not be differenced out, so the dispersion of distinct calendar adoption dates is decisive for whether the design identifies an adoption effect or a common shock.

source: Bernal JL, Cummins S, Gasparrini A, Interrupted time series regression for the evaluation of public health interventions, International Journal of Epidemiology (2017)

source: Callaway B, Sant'Anna PHC, Difference-in-Differences with multiple time periods, Journal of Econometrics (2021)


claim: Construct validity requires demonstrating an operation instantiates the named construct and not a correlated proxy by giving a second independent operationalization that should move together if the construct is real and stating what divergence would falsify; the download-versus-publication convergence check (a publication rise unaccompanied by a distribution rise is pre-committed as relabeling and falsifies) instantiates exactly this, and a drifting measuring instrument coincident with the intervention is the Campbellian instrumentation threat the control series differences out.

source: Shadish WR, Cook TD, Campbell DT, Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference (2002)


claim: Generalization is a reasoned UTOS argument over units, treatments, observations, and settings rather than a free gift of a representative sample, and a black-box average transports poorly while an identified mechanism licenses extrapolation; the candidate's transfer rule (the effect generalizes to the extent the target mission resembles, in user-community size and binding constraint, the sensor classes estimated) is a mechanism-keyed warrant, so the estimate is local to matched-comparable NASA optical-and-near-optical missions in-window and carries no warrant for transport to commercial, classified, non-US-civil, or real-time-operational archives.

source: Ludwig J, Kling JR, Mullainathan S, Mechanism Experiments and Policy Evaluations, Journal of Economic Perspectives 25(3) (2011)


claim: Relieving a non-binding constraint leaves output unchanged, so the access-cost framework yields a checkable null: if access cost is not the binding constraint (analysis funding, data-product immaturity, or a latent community too small to mobilize is), lowering it produces no yield gain; the pre-registered falsifier (an open-adopting cell whose distribution logs show no rise in distinct downloading institutions, or whose sensor-class community is sub-threshold, should show a break indistinguishable from zero) is therefore admissible.

source: Stoler A et al., Binding Constraints to Trade Expansion: Aid for Trade Objectives and Diagnostics Tools (2009)

source: Ackoff RL, The Future of Operational Research is Past, Journal of the Operational Research Society (1979)


claim: A mission-level treatment effect (open vs matched restricted mission) is consistent with the containing community system being flat if the gain is offset by an equal loss on the control missions (suboptimization: improving a part can degrade the whole), so an aggregate-pool conservation check is the methodologically warranted demand and a mission-level panel can record an effect while the emergent community property is unchanged.

source: Ackoff RL, Towards a System of Systems Concepts, Management Science (1971)


claim: The canonical Earth-science benefit synthesis attributes the post-2008 surge in Landsat scientific use jointly to the free-and-open policy AND to the pre-existing multi-decadal USGS/EROS archive, analysis-ready processing, and an already-organized remote-sensing community, so 'open-data policy' as a free-standing transportable rule is a reduction error and the warranted move is to explain the yield by the access rule's role in the containing curation-and-community system.

source: Zhu Z, Wulder MA, Roy DP, Woodcock CE, Hansen MC, Radeloff VC et al., Benefits of the free and open Landsat data policy, Remote Sensing of Environment (2019)