Last week in Nature Medicine, Elizabeth Devitt wrote about two studies that illustrate the perverse incentives in the scientific community in relation to reproducible research and data stewardship in the life sciences.
First, authors of papers in the Annals of Internal Medicine were surveyed about their willingness to provide additional information about their study protocols to other investigators who may be trying to replicate their experiments. The proportion answering 'yes' dropped from about 80% in 2008 to 60% today (see her article for a graphic). Now, I don't know if the size of this drop is comparable to the sampling error; it is not clear what survey methodology was used and how precise the estimates are. Nonetheless, the article discusses the lack of incentive for scientists to help others reproduce their experiments. This is a major gap in the incentive system for science, where competition for funding and status is fierce. We should take heart that at least there are still a majority of authors answering 'yes'.
The second item Devitt mentions is a study showing the decline over time of even the availability of such information, as data becomes lost or inaccessible. This study surveyed authors of papers in Molecular Ecology published from 1991-2011. This illustrates the issue of data stewardship that Nature's new open data journal will hopefully help to address.
No comments:
Post a Comment