The Tree of Life: Oh the irony - new #OpenAccess #PLoSOne paper on Research Blogs doesn't share data behind analyses.

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-05-13

Summary:

“Interesting new paper: PLoS ONE: Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information. All about the new world of science blogging.  Much of the context here relates to openness.  Yet as far as I can tell, the data collected that make up the meat of the analyses in the paper, are not shared.  Uggh. Is there something I am missing here? Shouldn't a prerequisite of publishing this kind of paper be sharing the information / data used in the analyses?  Shouldn't that be released with the paper? Definitely time to start ‘Open Data Watch’ where people have a place to complain about lack of open availability of data behind papers (I came up with the name as a mimic of Ivan Oransky's diverse watch sites like Retraction Watch).  Originally in thinking about doing this I had been thinking about genomic data.  But I am sure this is a problem in other areas.  Consider paleontology, where openness to fossils and other samples is, well, not as common as it should be.  It is not that hard anymore to find a place to share one's data.  With places like Data Dryad and Biotorrents and FigShare and Merritt and100s of others it is really inexcusable not to share the data behind a paper in most cases.  Certainly, in some cases there maybe privacy issues but that is not the case here (I think) and not an issue in most cases. Come on people.  If scientific papers are to be reproducible and testable, you need to give people access to the data you used... Shema, H., Bar-Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (2012). Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information PLoS ONE, 7 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0035869”

Link:

http://phylogenomics.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/oh-irony-new-openaccess-plosone-paper.html

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.comment oa.plos oa.open_science oa.figshare oa.social_media oa.repositories.data oa.dryad oa.blogs oa.biotorrents oa.merritt oa.repositories

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

05/13/2012, 14:25

Date published:

05/13/2012, 14:40