A new Boson?

[Jehanne]

Many of the members of the experiment didn't even want to be on the initial publication.

It seems very odd that researches could be compelled to have their names co-authored to a scientific paper whose conclusions that they did not believe were, in fact, correct.

[Alex K]

Many of the members of the experiment didn't even want to be on the initial publication.

It seems very odd that researches could be compelled to have their names co-authored to a scientific paper whose conclusions that they did not believe were, in fact, correct.

But they didn't draw much in the way of conclusions in the paper. They reported an experimental result and basically asked the community to have a look at it and help figure out what happened. Sure, many certainly *hoped* that it was a real effect because that would have been huge, but they didn't write "we show that neutrinos travel at superluminal velocities". They roughly speaking said "Our measurement of the time of flight between CERN and Gran Sasso yields a smaller value than expected. That would correspond to a velocity of ..." That may seem like a minor change in wording but it's a big difference.
It was true that that's what they measured. What it really means is a different story. Still it was very controversial among the collaborators what to do with it and many thought it was a mistake to even publish it because it would be misinterpreted or overhyped. Which of course happened. I think it was great because it was a rare opportunity for the public to see how the science sausage is made - a strange result appears, controversy ensues, people looking for explanations in all directions, finally finding the true reason, everyone goes on to the next measurement. But yes, many shared your concern that one shouldn't report a result one assumes is faulty.

The original abstract:
The OPERA neutrino experiment at the underground Gran Sasso Laboratory has measured the velocity of neutrinos from the CERN CNGS beam over a baseline of about 730 km with much higher accuracy than previous studies conducted with accelerator neutrinos. The measurement is based on high-statistics data taken by OPERA in the years 2009, 2010 and 2011. Dedicated upgrades of the CNGS timing system and of the OPERA detector, as well as a high precision geodesy campaign for the measurement of the neutrino baseline, allowed reaching comparable systematic and statistical accuracies. An early arrival time of CNGS muon neutrinos with respect to the one computed assuming the speed of light in vacuum of (60.7 ± 6.9 (stat.) ± 7.4 (sys.)) ns was measured. This anomaly corresponds to a relative difference of the muon neutrino velocity with respect to the speed of light (v-c)/c = (2.48 ± 0.28 (stat.) ± 0.30 (sys.)) ×10−5.

But coming back to the topic of this thread - the claims they make are even weaker. They barely acknowledge that it's a significant deviation at all. That is also because they don't combine both experiment's results but prepare independent analyses which separately, have lower statistical significance.