data (non)sharing 

 Jeremy Freese, an RWJ Health Policy Scholar at IQSS this year, sent me this amazing abstract (below) from the front lines of the replication movement, in psychology.  On the same topic, but different discipline, don't miss Jeremy's "Reproducibility Standards in Quantitative Social Science: Why Not Sociology?"  (find the pdf at  his homepage ) forthcoming, Sociological Methods and Research, July 2006.  (I've written  some  on this topic too). 

 "The Poor Availability of Psychological Research Data for Reanalysis"
By Wicherts, Jelte M.; Borsboom, Denny; Kats, Judith; Molenaar, Dylan
 American Psychologist . 61(7), Oct 2006, 726-728.

 Abstract

 The origin of the present comment lies in a failed attempt to obtain,
through e-mailed requests, data reported in 141 empirical articles
recently published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Our
original aim was to reanalyze these data sets to assess the robustness
of the research findings to outliers. We never got that far. In June
2005, we contacted the corresponding author of every article that
appeared in the last two 2004 issues of four major APA journals. Because
their articles had been published in APA journals, we were certain that
all of the authors had signed the APA Certification of Compliance With
APA Ethical Principles, which includes the principle on sharing data for
reanalysis. Unfortunately, 6 months later, after writing more than 400
e-mails--and sending some corresponding authors detailed descriptions of
our study aims, approvals of our ethical committee, signed assurances
not to share data with others, and even our full resumes-we ended up
with a meager 38 positive reactions and the actual data sets from 64
studies (25.7% of the total number of 249 data sets). This means that
73% of the authors did not share their data.