The curious case of the closed access data set in the open access journal | Randal S. Olson

"Earlier this year, I ran across a news article that got me really excited in the science-nerdy kind of way. The article talked about how we could measure how happy the people in each U.S. state are just by looking at geotagged tweets. They even linked to a shwanky web app that the researchers had put together showing the 'average happiness' of the U.S. since 2009. I have a penchant for playing around with social network data, so I was ecstatic when I saw that the authors had published the corresponding article in PLoS ONE (two articles, in fact). That means I could easily get my hands on the raw data set, right? Wrong. I received a response to my raw data request a week later saying that they couldn’t share the raw Twitter data. They’re absolutely right, of course. It says it right there in the Twitter API usage terms. The problem is: That restriction directly contradicts PLoS ONE’s rules about sharing data. In fact, it’s bolded right there on the web site ..."