On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 11:11:09AM +1300, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
The fruits of scientific research are supposed to be open to all. A key part of this is the need for reproducibility -- the idea that somebody else can repeat the same experiments and analysis and (hopefully) come to the same conclusions. It has long been a common expectation that researchers will make their raw data available to others for this purpose,
Well, not necessarily. It is expected that the data acquisition and analysis has been described to the detail that someone else could repeat the entire experiment, including the data acquisition. But if the data acquisition is difficult or impossible to repeat or replicate (for example, it is a one-off event or it involves incredible expense so is not practical for anyone else) then there is an expectation that raw data should be provided.
but nowadays even that is likely no longer enough. The analysis of the data usually requires some particular piece of computer software, even if this was just some in-house scripting done on top of a commonly-available toolkit or package.
In other words, they have failed to describe the data analysis in sufficient detail that it is repeatable, which, indeed, is a major problem. Cheers, Michael.