Does the EPA’s call for transparency in science make any sense? | Could Scott Pruitt Have a Point?

"The EPA is calling for more transparency in science. Yes, it’s hypocritical and ill-considered—but let’s be crystal clear about the potential benefits.

The recent discovery of alarming rates of false-positive results in several research literatures—the so-called replication crisis—has led to a series of reforms in science publishing and practice, with the goal of making studies more transparent and reproducible. In the past few weeks, this push for openness by academics has been taken up by the Trump administration. Under the direction of Administrator Scott Pruitt, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency put out a plan in late April to “strengthen transparency” in its use of research findings. If that rule goes through (we’re in the middle of a 30-day period for public comment), then any data, models, or analyses used by the agency for setting environmental standards would have to be made available for public scrutiny. The proposal claims that these changes would be in line with the open-science movement as a whole and that they would be “informed by the policies recently adopted by some major scientific journals, spurred in some part by the ‘replication crisis.’ ”..."