California Construction Trucking Association (CCTA)

Compiled by Prof. Stan Young, Assistant Director for Bioinformatics at the National Institute of Statistical Sciences

• Data Sharing Position: When authors hold their data private, it becomes “Trust Me Science,” which is not science at all. The operative rule should be: “make the data set used in a publication electronically available on publication” and “no regulatory agency can use papers for a regulatory decision where the data set is not publicly available.”
• National Institute of Health on Data Sharing: The NIH writes in their section on timeliness of data sharing,“Recognizing that the value of data often depends on their timeliness, data sharing should occur in a timely fashion. NIH expects the timely release and sharing of data to be no later than the acceptance for publication of the main findings from the final dataset
• A National Academy of Science panel took the position that data used in a publication should be publicly available on publication (Board on Life Sciences, Sharing Publication-Related Data and Materials: Responsibilities of Authorship in the Life Sciences, National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2003).
  See www.nap.edu/books/0309088593/html/.
• Legal Opinion: 1972 decision of the Texas Supreme Court: “Data on which expert opinion is based is not available to examine” is not acceptable (Lewis v. Southmore Savings Ass’n, /480 S.W.2d 180, Tex., 1972).
• The Antidote to Bias in Research (Science 326: 522, 23Oct2009) By David B. Allison, Departments of Biostatistics and Nutritional Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham
  THE MOST COMMONLY DISCUSSED SHIELD against bias in scientific practice is disclosure of financial conflicts of interest (COI). Such disclosure is necessary because the public wants it. Yet, a growing cadre of scientists questions the value of disclosure policies. These dissenters note that (i) such policies may actually increase biased behavior among some persons, (ii) judging scientists’ credibility by their associations is tantamount to McCarthyism, (iii) financial interests are neither the sole nor necessarily the most compelling motives for COIs, and (iv) judging credibility of scientific conclusions based on characteristics of the scientist offering them is antithetical to the essence of science, which should rely on data and deductive reasoning alone. I add to this list that disclosure does nothing to buttress the validity of the scientific information and conclusions produced. Given this, how can we ensure the validity of scientific information and conclusions in the face of the potentially biasing influences such as personal predilection, financial interests, philosophical leanings, and the search for personal aggrandizement? The answer lies in the methods of science itself.
  
  Publicly sharing data offers one examplative countermeasure. When data are public, no one need take analyses on faith. Anyone with the skills can conduct their own analyses, draw their own conclusions, and share those conclusions with others. This is more constructive than simply casting doubt on the analyses’ integrity because of the analyst’s affiliations.
  The movement toward open data has begun. NIH, Science, the Nature journals, and other journals all have policies encouraging or mandating it. Still, compliance with data sharing is challenging. Although Nature Genetics (NG) requires authors to publicly deposit data sets when publishing microarray gene expression studies, a recent study found enough data to reproduce published work for only 2 of 18 papers analyzed. For the remainder, data were either not found or incomplete, or original analysis descriptions were insufficiently detailed to permit attempts to replicate them. In another study, refusal to share data despite policies requiring sharing was nearly ubiquitous among authors publishing in Public Library of Science journals. This indicates that effective implementation of data sharing policies requires resources to support implementation and monitoring.
  We must recognize that bias exists, and exercise our creativity more and our sanctimony less in seeking ways to minimize it. To paraphrase Adam Smith, with his focus on methods and processes, science itself is the antidote to the poison of bias in research.
• Climate Example: In mid-August, 2009, after repeated requests for such data under the Freedom of Information Act, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU), one of the three international agencies that calculate global temperatures, announced that it discarded the raw data used to calculate global surface temperatures. The CRU action renders independent review and verification of the temperature trends published by the CRU impossible – a clear violation of principles of science and the Freedom of Information Act.
• Judy Curry, On the credibility of climate research, Climate Audit, November 22, 2009 commented: “Transparency. Climate data needs to be publicly available and well documented. This includes metadata that explains how the data were treated and manipulated, what assumptions were made in assembling the data sets, and what data was omitted and why. This would seem to be an obvious and simple requirement, but the need for such transparency has only been voiced recently as the policy relevance of climate data has increased.... given the growing policy relevance of climate data, increasingly higher standards must be applied to the transparency and availability of climate data and metadata. These standards should be clarified, applied and enforced by the relevant national funding agencies and professional societies that publish scientific journals.”
• Ethics Violation Claimed by AAPOR: The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) announced on February 4 that its eight-month investigation found that Gilbert Burnham had violated the association’s code of professional ethics and practices. AAPOR found that Burnham, a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, repeatedly refused to make public essential facts about his research on civilian deaths in Iraq. According to the AAPOR statement, the inquiry “focused on Burnham’s publication of results from a survey reported in the October 2006 issue of the journal, The Lancet. When asked to provide several basic facts about this research, Burnham refused.” The AAPOR statement can be read at www.aapor.org aaporfindsgilbertburnhaminviolationofethicscode.
  Good quote about those who lie and those who tell the truth - I’ll leave you with a favorite quotation from one of my heroes, the great classical liberal journalist, H.L. Mencken: “The men the American public admires most extravagantly are the most daring liars (your friends at CARB, the UC System & BYU’s papal equivalent come to mind); the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth (Drs. Enstrom, Young, and Moolgavkar).”