Daniel Simons: The fog of data - secrecy and science
abernard102@gmail.com 2012-09-25
Summary:
"Brent Donnellan recently wrote this troubling blog post about his experiences in requesting the data from a published study that he and his colleagues were trying to replicate (and, in fact, failing to replicate). John Bargh provided the data from his original study (Bargh & Shalev, 2012), but demanded that Donnellan and colleagues keep the data confidential and not share it or their re-analyses with anyone. That demand flies in the face of both APA and NIH ethical guidelines. NIH requires grantees, at least for grants over 500k, to provide a data sharing plan and to stick to it. When confidentially of the subjects can be assured (as it almost certainly could in this case), and the study is already published, there is no excuse for preventing other scholars from discussing the original data or identifying any problems they found. That’s how science is supposed to operate. If there were some mistake in the analysis or the data itself, and a re-analysis revealed that problem, it should be made public so that other scholars are aware of the concerns. Of course, it would be inappropriate to use someone else's data to generate new publications based on the data without the permission of the original authors, but that's not what Donnellan and colleagues wanted to do..."