Make Research Data Public? -- Not Always so Simple: A Dialogue for Statisticians and Science Editors

TL;DR

This paper discusses the complexities and challenges of making research data publicly accessible, emphasizing that data availability does not guarantee data usability for meaningful analysis, and explores policy and practical considerations.

Contribution

It presents a dialogue among statisticians and science editors on the nuanced issues of data sharing policies and their implications for scientific integrity and statistical practice.

Findings

Data sharing is more complex than simply making data public.

Effective data accessibility requires careful policy and practical considerations.

The dialogue highlights the importance of understanding statistical needs in data sharing policies.

Abstract

Putting data into the public domain is not the same thing as making those data accessible for intelligent analysis. A distinguished group of editors and experts who were already engaged in one way or another with the issues inherent in making research data public came together with statisticians to initiate a dialogue about policies and practicalities of requiring published research to be accompanied by publication of the research data. This dialogue carried beyond the broad issues of the advisability, the intellectual integrity, the scientific exigencies to the relevance of these issues to statistics as a discipline and the relevance of statistics, from inference to modeling to data exploration, to science and social science policies on these issues.