A story of two major retractions from a well known research group has been getting a lot of play over the last few days with a News Feature (1) and Editorial (2) in the 15 May edition of Nature....
Much of the heat the story is generating is about the characters involved and possible misconduct of various players, but that’s not what I want to cover here. My concern is about how much time, effort, and tears could have been saved if all the relevant raw data was made available in the first place....
So what might have happened if the original raw data were available? Would it have prevented the publication of the papers in the first place? It’s very hard to tell....[I]f...the referees had seen the raw data with greater variability then maybe they would have wanted to see more or better controls; perhaps not. Certainly if the raw data were available the second group would have realised much sooner that something was wrong.
And this is a story we see over and over again. The selective publication of results without reference to the full set of data; a slight shortcut taken or potential issues with the data somewhere that is not revealed to referees or to the readers of the paper; other groups spending months or years attempting to replicate results or simply use a method described by another group. And in the meantime graduate students and postdocs get burnt on the pyre of scientific ‘progress’ discovering that something isn’t reproducible....
There is no longer any excuse for not providing all the raw and processed data as part of the supplementary information for published papers....
Some of us go much further than this, and believe that making the raw data immediately available is a better way to do science. Certainly in this case it might have reduced the pressure to rush to publish, might have forced a more open and more thorough scrutiny of the underlying data. This kind of radical openness is not for everyone perhaps but it should be less prone to gaffes of the sort described here....
Science has moved on from the days where the paper could only contain what would fit on the printed pages....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/17/2008 11:31:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
