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Research Data: Share Early, Share Often
Shipud writes "Holland was recently in the news when a psychology professor in Tilburg University was found to have committed large-scale fraud over several years. Now, another Dutch psychologist is suggesting a way to avert these sort of problems, namely by 'sharing early and sharing often,' since fraud may start with small indiscretions due to career-related pressure to publish. In Wilchert's study, he requested raw data from the authors of some 49 papers. He found that the authors' reluctance to share data was associated with 'more errors in the reporting of statistical results and with relatively weaker evidence (against the null hypothesis). The documented errors are arguably the tip of the iceberg of potential errors and biases in statistical analyses and the reporting of statistical results. It is rather disconcerting that roughly 50% of published papers in psychology contain reporting errors and that the unwillingness to share data was most pronounced when the errors concerned statistical significance.'"
...most people who do it are downright bad at it. That they might take more time and care to be good at it without the perpetual axe of publish-publish-publish and grants funding hanging over their heads is another issue all together.
Einstein was unable to find a teaching post, and was working in a patent office when he published his annus mirabilis papers. Things have changed over the years though. John Dewey discovered a century ago how children best learned - let the child direct his own learning, and have an adult to facilitate this. This, of course, is not how children are taught. Things nowadays are very test-heavy, and becoming even more so, not as a means to help students in seeing what their deficiencies are, but as a punishment system - and the teachers, and the administrators are under the same punishment system. The carrot of reward is very vague and ill-defined and far-off. It is a system designed to try to squelch the curiosity of those handful of students who had been curious and wanted to learn. Businesses want to get into the education gravy train, and all this charter school stuff is being embraced by both parties, which isn't surprising if you look at the funding behind it.
At the university, the financial incentives are all aligned so that publishing is a necessity. If one does not publish, they do not get tenure, and then all those years of work were for naught as the academic career is over. And what gets published? An average series of experiments done by the scientific method would usually lead to either inconclusive data and results, or just wind up in a dead end. And what journal wants to publish those results after months of work? One of the most popular Phd comics is this one. It seems fairly obvious to me - the more financial incentives are tied to getting published, the more that bogus studies are going to be published. As far as the idea of honesty, integrity or whatever, these things will gradually subside for most people when they come into conflict with keeping a roof over one's head and food on the table.