From Science: All data necessary to understand, assess, and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to any reader of Science. All computer codes involved in the creation or analysis of data must also be available to any reader of Science. After publication, all reasonable requests for data and materials must be fulfilled. [...]
http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/contribinfo/prep/gen_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_e-mail_controv...
By all means, force researchers to publish all the tools necessary to reproduce their results. But you can't expect to set up surveillance in their head.
It could go as you suggest. Or it could be like a locker room: if everybody is naked, then nobody cares.
What made me add drafts to the lists is Daniel Dennett's energetic description in Consciousness Explained of how he repeatedly circulates drafts of papers to colleagues for comment. At least in philosophy, that's an important part of the process.
Having to show interim steps would make fraud much harder, and it's a zero-overhead thing if people are already backing up their work.
Your shower analogy doesn't work because there's no way to force people to post drafts. We already have the option posting of drafts. It's called personal websites and/or the arXiv.
But when the goal is to create a result rather than report it, transparency is the enemy
I strongly believe that errors are a much more pervasive problem in science and related fields than malice is.
But we are talking about economics, and republican groups like fox news eat it up.
My favorite example is the 2011 chart distorting the display of the unemployment rate:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/12/12/today-in-dishonest-f...
Wherever the line is drawn, the dishonesty of some random Fox News chart is not related to the honesty or dishonesty of actual scientific research.
The much bigger problem in science is error.
Econ and Psych really do lie in a gray area, and by avoid the demarcation debate you completely miss the relevance of the issue at hand.
If policy makers weren't using this study to justify more austerity, then we probably wouldn't have such a prolonged discussion.
True, but I haven't seen a liberal think tank manipulate charts in that specific manner.
I suspect there are plenty of similar issues in economics. People with money are much more likely to support researchers whose work benefits or protects people with money. E.g., I happened to read a paper from a U of Chicago prof arguing that insider trading is actually beneficial. Boy, I wonder who the big donors are there. Probably not Mother Jones Magazine.
In science generally, probably. In areas tightly connected to perennial areas of sharp ideological policy divides, like macroeconomics, I'm less convinced.
The problem is that economics is not a field related to science. The vast majority of public policy economics starts with a conclusion, and then creates facts to support that conclusion. This is not science, it is religion.
(insert disclamier about this being an overgeneralization)
According to the article, many people wasted a lot of time attempting to recreate their results. Further, the paper is highly-cited and it probably shaped, directly or indirectly, opinions, further research directions, and possibly even policy.
We are focusing on the Excel error, which was likely a mistake. I'm really struggling though to justify their choice of weighting/averaging. It's confounding that two highly regarded and experienced academics would choose something so particularly bad. It absolutely should have been noted in the text.