Sluggish data sharing hampers reproducibility effort : Nature News & Comment
peter.suber's bookmarks 2018-10-30
Summary:
"An initiative that aims to validate the findings of key cancer papers is being slowed by an unexpected hurdle — problems accessing data from the original studies.
The Reproducibility Initiative: Cancer Biology consortium aims to repeat experiments from 50 highly-cited studies published in 2010–12 in journals such as Nature, Cell and Science, to see how easy it is to reproduce their findings. Although these journals require authors to share their data on request, it has taken two months on average to get the data for each paper, said William Gunn, a co-leader of the project, at the 4th World Conference on Research Integrity in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 3 June.
For one paper, securing the necessary data took a year. And the authors of four other papers have stopped communicating with the project altogether. In those instances, the journals that published the studies are stepping in to remind researchers of their responsibilities...."