I’m a big fan of open data but struggle to articulate its value in a quantified way other than just my gut feeling of more transparency leads to more collaboration leads to more research leads to more knowledge.

But I think examples like this mean that we’re getting closer to if a study doesn’t release all its data- raw, cleaned, and analytical tables- then it will be discounted or ignored. And there’s fame and money to be made in finding data irregularities.

We still need some way to audit and confirm data regularities, but that is boring and I think no money there. I’m not sure if there will be some chore assignment for students to pick a dataset, analyze it for rigor, and post results somewhere so every paper has a link to people who checked data and found it appropriate. I hope this means 99.9% of studies have proper data and not just when we hear about the (hopefully) rare studies that falsify or just don’t work with properly and make inaccurate conclusions.