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Comment by MaxBarraclough | Hacker News Reader

Obvious question then: what are the arguments/forces opposing this? Just inertia in the publishing norms?

There is an incentive against doing it. No researcher wants the embarrassment of having an error that they didn't know about discovered. Journals don't fancy the embarrassment or hassle either. It would serve broader scientific progress, but that's not who is deciding to hide the data.

A tragedy of the commons, then?

If you ever find yourself thinking like this, get the f out of science asap, you have no idea what you are doing.

It follows from your comment that we should have anonymous authors in addition to anonymous reviewers. Can a researcher establish a provable track record of doing quality work while remaining anonymous?

only if they are independently wealthy

That would never happen, again because of incentives. Academics want to build their brand and publishing anonymously doesn't help with that.

Presently, for sure. I was wondering in the hypothetical, too, though. Authors really just need to provably show that they have a strong influence/presence on the publication graph or something. Although, reducing a researcher's entire value to a single scalar index is probably fraught. Also, egos would never go for completely anonymous authorship system, I think.

There's likely multiple forces, but at least one must be money. Someone's gotta host the data, right? That falls on either the universities or the publishers.

The approach fails miserably when taken in aggregate. I would read five to ten papers from my own field a week while in grad school. If I had to do the analysis for myself as well there wouldn't be any time to do my own research.

Add on twenty more papers a week from adjacent fields where I don't even know all the techniques and the magnitude of the problem hopefully becomes clearer.

The raw figures would be available in addition to the paper itself, not instead of it.

Gelman's suggestion is how to handle articles with unlikely conclusions: don't publish the submitted article, though that presumably would be circulated as a preprint, but just the data. Then the journal is bringing attention to interesting data without endorsing the dubious analysis or conclusions.

Thanks, must have read that too quickly :-P

It doesn't strike me as as very practical step. Pre-registration seems much more sensible.

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