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Scientists demand to disclose all data in publications

Only last week, on September 23rd, Nature published a correspondence by Keith Baggerly from the University of Texas demanding to disclose all data in publications in order to make their results reproducable. Reproducibility is depicted as a “cornerstone for scientific publishing”. The correspondence is a reaction on three clinical trials by Duke University in Durham, North Carolina that were suspended in 2009 “because of the irrepoducibility of “genomic signatures” that were used to select cancer therapies for patients”.

The Journal of Unsolved Questions even goes one step further: We believe that reproducibility should be the most important criterion for scientific publishing and not the conclusions and results drawn from the collected data. Therefore we believe that negative results are just as valuable as positive results.

See Nature 467, 401 (23 September 2010), doi:10.1038/467401b