Stevan, although I agree with you on Open Access, I disagree with you on Open
Data. There are strong arguments for making scientific data publicly accessible
at the time of publication.
"WHY ARCHIVE?
Norms of methodological transparency encourage honesty in the reporting of
research results. In a worst-case scenario, pressures for career advancement,
tenure, or prestige may create perverse incentives to “publish or perish” that,
if not countered with some form of accountability, can easily lead researchers
to misstate conclusions.Yet erroneous inferences may not even necessarily result
from nefarious intentions. Simple coding errors or a flawed syntax file can
produce results that the investigator believes to be correct even when they are
not. Making the data and programming decisions publicly available limits the
extent to which bad findings influence future research.
There are, in fact, ample examples of errors in quantitative analysis leading
to—at best—ambiguity in findings. One replication of a 1986 American
Sociological Review article led to a debate over whether four different couples
in the analyzed survey sample were really having sex 88 times a month, or if the
88s in the data file were actually meant to refer to missing observations (Jasso
1985, 1986; Kahn and Udry 1986). A broader study in economics by Dewald,
Thursby, and Anderson (1986) sought to replicate a year’s worth of articles in
the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking. The principal finding was that, in
the vast majority of cases, it was entirely impossible to exactly replicate the
published results even with the help of the articles’ original authors. This led
to the adoption of more stringent requirements in journals such as the American
Economic Review requiring that data be made available at the time of
publication."
Jeremy J. Albright and Jared A. Lyle, “Data Preservation Through Data Archives,”
PS: Political Science & Politics 43, no. 01 (2010): 17-21.
I also disagree that mandating open data will remove researchers' incentive to
collect the data in the first place. Their incentive to collect the data will
still be that they will get the first opportunity to interpret the data and
publish their interpretation. If the data are really novel and their
interpretation is valid, that is all they need to advance their careers as
researchers. Embargoes on the publication of data just slow down science,
holding it hostage to the self-interest of a single researcher, by giving that
researcher a monopoly on the use of the data in question, forbidding others from
attempting to verify that researcher's interpretation.
Ben
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http://sites.google.com/site/benjamingeer/
Received on Thu May 20 2010 - 20:39:46 BST