Open Data « Science-Based Medicine

"PLOS (the Public Library of Science) is a non-profit open access publisher of science articles. Their goal is to make scientific data accessible to everyone, in the name of transparency and open communication. Now they have taken their approach one step further, announcing their policy that all articles published in a PLOS journal must submit their original data so that anyone can access and analyze it for themselves ... I think this is a fabulous idea, for many reasons. We frequently write here at SBM about the challenges faced by the various institutions of science to maintain high standards of quality and transparency. Those challenges include publication bias, the literature being flooded with preliminary or low quality research, researchers exploiting degrees of freedom (also referred to as 'p-hacking') without their questionable behavior being apparent in the final published paper, conflicts of interest, the relative lack of replications and lack of desire on the part of editors to publish replications, frequent statistical errors and the occasional deliberate fraud ..."