Making raw data more widely available

Medical investigators routinely refuse to share data from medical studies, seeming to regard such data as private property rather than a public resource for the benefit of medical science and future generations of patients. One survey found that 75% of pharmaceutical researchers were opposed in principle to making raw data available.1 Two studies have found that only a minority of researchers (10% and 25%) share data when publishing in journals with explicit policies that raw data must be made available.2 3 Even in genomics research, where the principle that microarray data should be deposited in a publicly accessible database is widely accepted, many published studies do not have an associated data set publicly available.4 5

The benefits of sharing raw data from medical studies have been widely discussed.6 7 8 9 Data sharing ensures reproducibility, allows testing of secondary hypotheses, facilitates development of new statistical methods, provides …