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Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

It's totally irrelevant and shameful that data is held back for such reasons. Put a disclaimer/warning on it if need be.

When scientists play a part in the open access problem it's like having doctors who smoke cigarettes. There are plenty reasons the cancer is happening already without the leaders of a field contributing to it.

"In our field of particle physics, there isn't the tradition of making data public," says Thaler. "To actually get data publicly with no other restrictions—that's unprecedented."

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The OP was right, though. Just making the data accessible and documented is a huge undertaking. It's truly a laudable effort.

From the other side, I cannot imagine using the data without intimate knowledge of the entire setup. There are very few people that can look meaningfully at such kind of data, which is why publishing the dataset (and all the work it involves) is often neglected.

Not to defend the behavior in any way, but remind yourself: in the current research model, if you can't make a publication with it, it's not worth your time. For a dataset, I've seen people factor-in the effort to make it public VS the potential citations you could get out of it.

disclaimer: I work in research

> in the current research model, if you can't make a publication with it, it's not worth your time

Which is why it's high time publishing data along with research is made the default, if not mandatory. This way the incentives are aligned and there's time and money budget for this vital task. Some journals are leading the way here.

Journals should not accept for publication articles which do not come with data and analysis source code for full replication of the results reported.

There are very valid reasons for embargo periods. Other than that I agree. That should be the default.

Why do you believe journals are the correct place to apply pressure?

Because in principle peer review is the basis of scientific progress. Without peer review, poor incentives lead to scientific inquiry about as accurate or useful as Buzzfeed.

Of course modern journals are a disgrace to the enlightenment. But the solution is to fix them, or if that can't be done, replace them. Not to stop the system of peer review entirely.

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