Holding Back Experimental Details, With Reason

There's a lot of worry these days about the reproducibility of scientific papers (a topic that's come up here many times). And there's reason to believe that the sharing of data, protocols, and materials is not going so well, either. . . . authors seem less willing to share these additional details about their study protocols than they have been in the past, according to a survey of 389 authors who published studies in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The findings, presented on 9 September at the International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication in Chicago, found that over the five years studied the percentage saying they would be willing to do so has dropped from almost 80% to only 60%. A lack of incentives for sharing might be partly to blame. “There's no recognition, no promotion and no profit for scientists who share more information,” says Steven Goodman, a clinical research expert at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, who was part of the team that evaluated the survey results. But there are two new papers out that deliberately does not share all the details, and it's not hard to see why. This NPR report has the background, but the abstract from the first paper will be enough for anyone in the field: Clostridium botulinum strain IBCA10-7060, isolated from a patient with infant botulism, produced botulinum neurotoxin type B (BoNT/B) and another BoNT that, by use of the standard mouse bioassay, could not be neutralized by any of th...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs