There is great interest in improving access to publications but access to primary data is a larger problem in my view with the increasing number of active researchers producing results that might be expensive and time consuming to reproduce from scratch even with a publication as a guide. Structural biology has been a leader in providing underlying data as well as completed work in databases such as the Protein Data Bank. The ability of researchers to download data as well as completed structures has proven important for the development of computational methods and for improving structure determinations. Yet in many areas the underlying data is not archived and is disappearing at an average rate or 7% per year after the primary publication - http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38755/title/Raw-Data-s-Vanishing-Act/. If basic data is a significant part of the value of research how can or should we save this investment?
You are right to call research an "investment," and the funding entity is always in a position to demand certain returns. Over the last several years in the USA, as you allude to, recipients of NIH funds have been obliged to make their publications truly public through PubMed Central. But as you correctly note, access to the underlying data is much more important than access to a manuscript. Even the best manuscript fails to glean all insights from a dataset, and the worst may overinterpret or misrepresent. Also, many data are never reported in publications. To ensure maximum return on investment, funding agencies should mandate data archiving in centrally maintained databases like (e.g., in my field) the Gene Expression Omnibus or Sequence Read Archive (US) or Array Express (Europe) and, with some reasonable time delay, divorce this expectation from publication. For example, if I pay for a high-throughput sequencing project with NIH funds, I should be required to make the results public (or at least available to any funded colleagues), along with full experimental details sufficient for replication studies, within a certain period of time regardless of whether I have published. The funding agency should provide a secure and well-maintained database as well as guidance and oversight.
While researching a small study of microarray data that I published in 2013 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235380207), I was surprised that even respected journals with data archiving mandates typically do not enforce them. I am of course not the first or only person to observe this. Less of a surprise was the finding that willingness to submit data seemed to correlate with the quality of a scientific study, and that data submitted post-publication often do not support the conclusions of a publication. Often, they are faulty and would result in instant rejection if reviewers had the time to look at them. My conclusion is that, since researchers and journals demonstrably will only rarely archive data reliably and consistently without impetus, funding agencies should help by instituting mandates and providing secure, well-maintained archives for all types of data.
Article Data Submission and Quality in Microarray-Based MicroRNA Profiling
I like Kennith's idea that funding agencies might reward or encourage placing the complete data into archives for the scientific community. Possibly this could come as small added funding or other encouragements.
One method being tested in the EU to insure coupled access to data and publications, is actually evaluating a coherent "open science" strategy as part of the scientific concept.
The latest EU research framework program would not award funds if such strategy is not well considered (at least on paper). The funding body then accompanies the stick with a bunch of carrots: a range of e-infrastructure projects to develop the data repositories for the various disciplines. This seems to be more progressive than most national research funders.
Policing the issue, or incentivizing the best performers, is something "open science" advocates have been calling for sometime, but there are cultural and technical issues.
Ultimately, the only long-term sustainable solution that does not need policing is to train graduates in "open science" literacy because it directly feeds into the prevalent "publish or perish" reality and need for impact, visibility and results reproducibility.
EC is currently asking for input whether Open Data and Open Science in general should be part of the Research Evaluation Framework scores for tenure position.
Consultation open until 30 Sept
http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/science-2.0/consultation_en.htm
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