Let the fun begin!

I have been saying for some time that it is often impossible to work out what most EAE line graphs are actually saying.

In a group of 8 does a mean score of 1 mean all got a score of one or did two get a score 4 and the rest no disease score 0 so again mean of 1. In the first instance it may be interesting drug effect if your placebo are scoring 3 or 4, in this instance was the data interesting or is it just a duff experiment, which needs repeating, were only two animals got disease.

How will you know,  well if you can see the data you can work it out and so the guff can be exposed.......So global science police. 

They are trying to get pharma to make their trial data freely available, now it is science's turn

Data Access for the Open Access Literature: PLOS’s Data Policy

Data are any and all of the digital materials that are collected and analyzed in the pursuit of scientific advances. In line with Open Access to research articles themselves, PLOS strongly believes that to best foster scientific progress, the underlying data should be made freely available for researchers to use, wherever this is legal and ethical. Data availability allows replication, reanalysis, new analysis, interpretation, or inclusion into meta-analyses, and facilitates reproducibility of research, all providing a better ‘bang for the buck’ out of scientific research, much of which is funded from public or nonprofit sources. Ultimately, all of these considerations aside, our viewpoint is quite simple: ensuring access to the underlying data should be an intrinsic part of the scientific publishing process.

PLOS journals have requested data be available since their inception, but we believe that providing more specific instructions for authors regarding appropriate data deposition options, and providing more information in the published article as to how to access data, is important for readers and users of the research we publish. As a result, PLOS is now releasing a revised Data Policy that will come into effect on March 1, 2014, in which authors will be required to include a data availability statement in all research articles published by PLOS journals

"PLOS journal editors encourage researchers to contact them if they encounter difficulties in obtaining data from articles published in PLOS journals. If restrictions on access to data come to light after publication, we reserve the right to post a correction, to contact the authors’ institutions and funders, or in extreme cases to retract the publication".
This needs a whole new level of record keeping and data management for some and electronic lab books will need to be the norm.

So now when there is some dubious data it can be tweezed apart.

Will others follow suit? Will you be bothered to publish if it creates lots of extra effort?

Will the data really be made available,  I hope it works better than open access to reagents. 

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