An article published by a team of NASA astrobiologists in 2010 in Science (journal) reported a bacterium known as GFAJ-1 that could purportedly metabolize arsenic (unlike any previously known species of lifeform).
This finding, along with NASA's claim that the paper "will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life", met with criticism within the scientific community. Much of the scientific commentary and critique around this issue took place in public forums, most notably on Twitter, where hundreds of scientists and non-scientists created a hashtag community around the hashtag #arseniclife.
University of British Columbia astrobiologist Rosie Redfield, one of the most vocal critics of the NASA team's research, also submitted a draft of a research report of a study that she and colleagues conducted which contradicted the NASA team's findings; the draft report appeared in arXiv, and Redfield called in her lab's research blog for peer review both of their research and of the NASA team's original paper.
Researcher Jeff Rouder defined Open Science as "endeavoring to preserve the rights of others to reach independent conclusions about your data and work".
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