About the JSA Products

Judging from my inbox, there is quite a lot of enthusiasm about the S2SRO products available from the JSA. We sure love this project, and it's great to see it hitting its stride and being useful to our external users. Still, I just want to throw in a couple of cautions so that people don't get caught out.

• We do not have official data releases, as most people understand them. By this I mean that the data is not vetted by anybody at the JAC - we simply don't have the effort for that.  Since right now we are still developing, we do trawl for obvious problems and bugs, but there's no scientific oversight of what the processing churns out, and the data is immediately exposed for download. So of course you may take the products, and a lot of them do seem to be publication quality, but you should still work through the reduction cookbook and make sure you understand what was done to your data.  The result you download shouldn't be different from what you would get if you run our latest software at home with the recommended parameters. The idea is to get you the best data we can give you now, rather than a perfect version of your data later. The processed products can also help you prioritise which datasets to spend most time on.

• As our data pipeline matures, or as we fix new bugs,  we do re-reduce the data - and every time we do this the new product replaces the old one. So if you intend to post-process and/or publish using downloaded products, make sure you retain the version of the product that you used in case you need to reproduce your work later.

 We do have a plan to allow users to upload their own versions of products into the JSA, but this is still a way off.