What exactly do you think they were doing for the six months between finding their results and publishing them? Are you under the impression that the OPERA scientists just randomly dump unvetted data on the public?
You labor under a false assumption of what the process of science is or should be.
Science is not a process of walking from one stepping stone of absolute, solid truth to another stepping stone of truth. Science is messy. Because the world is messy. Science is the process of observing the Universe as best we can given our limits and attempting to verify various models and conjectures about the way the Universe works. But along the way there are many potentials for pitfalls. Every experiment has a degree of error due to factors unrelated to what the experiment is trying to measure.
Published scientific papers are not like chapters in a text-book, they are merely the results of experiments. Sometimes it's possible to have experiments which seem to support one result or another but turn out to have some flaw or merely involve factors which we cannot explain yet. For example, we still don't know what "dark matter" actually is even though we have a pretty good idea that it does exist and some rough estimate of some of its properties. And for decades we did not know the origin of gamma ray bursts. It's the rare experiment that is definitive enough to provide unambiguous support or refutation for a specific theory, most experiments are somewhere in the middle, somewhat muddled, imperfect, and generally only gain strength once independently repeated and producing the same result.
They didn't claim to have proved Einstein wrong. To continue the weird analogy: They looked for the bug themselves, and couldn't find it, and then asked other people to find the bug.
pretty much. the mess newton caused by keeping calculus a proprietary technology for so long (due partially to existing practice in the alchemy industry and partially to being completely nuts) made it pretty clear that some degree of openness was necessary to really get anything done.
And they presented this openly for it to be checked. Einstein was not proven wrong because of this and Physics textbooks were not rewritten because of it. This was a great was to handle something that seemed very suspicious and trying to find out if it was correct. They did everything on their end and then presented it to the public for further scrutiny so I am not sure what you wanted them to do.
In addition to the other comments, it should be noted that this happens after the fact. You don't really know what your bugs will do until they turn up, which you can only know after you run the program.
Similarly, they didn't know what their results would be until after they ran the experiment. At that point, they can either: share the results, or hide the results. Hiding the results is the absolute worst thing that any scientist can do. The only time the option not to share the results would be acceptable is when they can be discredited or discounted (and sometimes they should still be shared). Since they couldn't discredit their results (they tried), they took the only responsible option remaining.
Indeed, they didn't just publish the results, they asked others to look for the bug. Like others have said, this is the best possible outcome.
The point was - you can't check everything beforehand. No matter how hard you try, there's always a non-zero probability that a bug will "prove Einstein wrong", or drive people into a ditch, or find horribly mismatched partners on a dating site, or explode toasters and kill puppies.
