Research Data

Scientists Are Hoarding Data And It’s Ruining Medical Research

Major flaws in two massive trials of deworming pills show the importance of sharing data — which most scientists don’t do

Ben Goldacre | July 22, 2015

We like to imagine that science is a world of clean answers, with priestly personnel in white coats, emitting perfect outputs, from glass and metal buildings full of blinking lights.
The reality is a mess. A collection of papers published on Wednesday — on one of the most commonly used medical treatments in the world — show just how bad things have become. But they also give hope.
...A decade later, in 2013, these two economists [Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer] did something that very few researchers have ever done. They handed over their entire dataset to independent researchers on the other side of the world, so that their analyses could be checked in public. What happened next has every right to kick through a revolution in science and medicine.

<more at http://www.buzzfeed.com/bengoldacre/deworming-trials; related links: http://boingboing.net/2015/07/23/when-scientists-hoard-data-no.html (When scientists hoard data, no one can tell what works. July 23, 2015) and http://recode.net/2014/06/07/medicines-big-problem-with-big-data-information-hoarding/ (Medicine’s Big Problem with Big Data: Information Hoarding)>