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When Is Science Not Science? When It's Not Science

By Hank Campbell in Science 2.0
October 18, 2014
Profile picture for user Hank
Submitted by Hank on Sat, 10/18/2014 - 06:49
Old NID
147149

Do you have a hypothesis but think replication is a waste of time? Do you have no underlying theoretical basis for your field but feel like your particular study is well-controlled?

You may not be as scientific as you think you are.

Can there be peer review, much less the post-publication kind, without sharing data? In the Wall Street Journal I took PNAS to task for publishing far too many stories with editors hand-picked by the author and that included no data. Dr. Francis Collins said he was worried about the lack of data and replicability of the majority of NIH trials - a $29 billion a year industry - until it came election season, when he declared the NIH would have developed an Ebola vaccine if a Republican Congress had given the NIH $330.1 billion over the last 13 years instead of only $330 billion. I lauded PLOS for its data requirement in that WSJ article, and then the next week they published a paper full of surveys - but the data was only available to friendly writers, which was the exact same tactic Gilles-Eric Séralini had about his 'GMOs cause cancer' paper.

There is as much confusion about what access to data means as there is about what constitutes good science. Experimental physicists share just about everything while neither corporate nor private sector biologists are as keen on the idea. Government physicists don't produce a product, so that is at least a rationalization for corporate biologists, but not so much for academic ones. Since up to 96% of their time is wasted, according to The Lancet, it may be time to get with the 21st century.

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2014/10/not-all-science-created-equal

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