Whose rights and who’s right?

The moral tone of Groves’ editorial—research is publicly funded; fellow scientists and citizens have a “right” to access “raw numbers, analyses, facts, ideas, and images”; some naughty researchers are colluding with industry to “keep the data hidden away”—was inappropriate.1

Firstly, an increasing number of journal editors are making naive assumptions about the nature of research knowledge. A proportion of such knowledge—for example, in basic sciences—can …