> Over 20 journals turned down her paper on the Weld study ...
And this:
> A decade ago, funding sources refused to fund re-identification experiments unless there was a promise that results would likely show that no risk existed or that all problems could be solved by some promising new theoretical technology under development.
And she didn't just do a "back-of-the-envelope calculation". She re-identified an actual public dataset, including the then governor of Massachusetts :)
And yes, showing this with a real dataset is nice, since it validates the estimation. But it still doesn't explain why it's worthy to fund. Funding is very competitive, and generally goes towards prospective research that can lead to innovation in the field. The article suggests that funding should go towards already-finished descriptive dataset analytics confirming back-of-envelope estimations, with no clear plan to find a solution.
It's also possible that this article is not expressing the nuance behind the actual work and reasons behind the rejections, so I'm not judging the researcher's work, but rather judging the claims in this article.
Though even so, your comment still stands (since I'm assuming whomever is in an editorial position has some kind of science background, at least at some of those journals).
As a social scientist, I'm not so sure...
It reminds me of the times when people who aren't programmers seem to make this discovery that there is such thing as technical debt, and that programmers should be focused on programming in a way that avoids technical debt ("these programmers should focus on writing maintainable code! Not just short term hacks"). It's an oversimplication of the situation that is not helpful.
I’d like to see the rejections, my guess is they mostly said “this is not novel or unexpected”.
To make the work novel you might suggest a new approach to anonymizing data for example...
Well, given how widely vulnerable de-identification was being implemented, that seems unlikely.