The March 9 Nature reported some disturbing news: “An editor on the board of a journal published by the prestigious American Psychological Association (APA) has been asked to resign in a controversy over data sharing in peer review.” The controversy arose when psychologist Gert Storm declared that he would review only papers whose data he could see. His declaration is not some whim of a fractious scientist. He is one of a few hundred scientists to proclaim that, starting in 2017, they will begin rejecting papers whose authors refuse to publicly share the underlying data or explain why they can’t. But the story of Gert Storms and other scientists asking for data to be shared is not a new phenomenon.
It has been more than a half a century since Leroy Wolins, a psychologist from Iowa State University, authorized one of his students to write a letter to thirty-seven authors of original research articles asking them to submit the raw data that their studies were based on. The student intended to make practical use of the data in a study of his own. Out of thirty-seven authors, thirty-two replied to the request. However, twenty-one of those thirty-two researchers who replied informed “with tremendous regret” that their data had been accidentally destroyed, lost, or archived in such a way that it was impossible to retrieve. Only nine researchers (24 percent of the initial group) appeared to be willing to make their data available. Wolins, an expert in statistics, took a closer look at the data received and concluded that only seven of them met the requirements of what we might call a reliable statistical analysis (Wolins 1962). Surprised by the scientists’ responses, Wolins described the experience in American Psychologist thus triggering a heated scientific debate over the availability of raw data.
In 1973, James R. Craig and Sandra C. Reese decided to replicate Wolins’s “accidental” study. They thoroughly planned and designed a new study to check whether there had been any improvement in the availability of raw data since Wolins’s attempt more than a decade earlier. They asked fifty-three researchers to provide them with the raw data that they had used in their research. The results were more optimistic than those presented by Wolins. Nine researchers refused to reveal the data, claiming it had been lost, destroyed, or was otherwise unavailable. Only about half of the researchers declared their readiness to cooperate. Twenty of them sent analyzed or summarized data. Seven declared they would cooperate but only under certain conditions (Craig and Reese 1973).