Priggish NEJM Editorial on Data-sharing Misses the Point it Almost Made | The Wire
page_amanda's bookmarks 2016-01-28
Summary:
"Twitter outraged like only Twitter could on January 22 over a strange editorial that appeared in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, calling for medical researchers to not make their research data public. The call comes at a time when the scientific publishing zeitgeist is slowly but surely shifting toward journals requiring, sometimes mandating, the authors of studies to make their data freely available so that their work can be validated by other researchers. Through the editorial, written by Dan Longo and Jeffrey Drazen, both doctors and the latter the chief editor, NEJM also cautions medical researchers to be on the lookout for ‘research parasites’, a coinage that the journal says is befitting “of people who had nothing to do with the design and execution of the study but use another group’s data for their own ends, possibly stealing from the research productivity planned by the data gatherers, or even use the data to try to disprove what the original investigators had posited”. As @omgItsEnRIz tweeted, do the authors even science?..."