[Infowarrior] - Secrecy in science is a corrosive force

[Richard Forno]

Secrecy in science is a corrosive force
By Michael Schrage

Published: November 27 2009 11:11 | Last updated: November 27 2009 11:11

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8aefbf52-d9e1-11de-b2d5-00144feabdc0.html

With no disrespect to sausages and laws, Bismarck’s most famous  
aphorism clearly requires updating. “Scientific research” is bidding  
furiously to make the global shortlist of things one should not see  
being made.

Understandably so. Sciences at the cutting edge of statistics and  
public policy can make blood sports seem genteel. Scientists  
aggressively promoting pet hypotheses often relish the opportunity to  
marginalise and neutralise rival theories and exponents.

The malice, mischief and Machiavellian manoeuvrings revealed in the  
illegally hacked megabytes of emails from the University of East  
Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit, for example, offers a  
useful paradigm of contemporary scientific conflict. Science may be  
objective; scientists emphatically are not. This episode illustrates  
what too many universities, professional societies, and research  
funders have irresponsibly allowed their scientists to become. Shame  
on them all.

The source of that shame is a toxic mix of institutional laziness and  
complacency. Too many scientists in academia, industry and government  
are allowed to get away with concealing or withholding vital  
information about their data, research methodologies and results. That  
is unacceptable and must change.

Only recently in America, for example, have academic pharmaceutical  
researchers been required to disclose certain financial conflicts of  
interest they might have. On issues of the greatest importance for  
public policy, science researchers less transparent than they should  
be. That behaviour undermines science, policy and public trust.

Dubbed “climate-gate” by global warming sceptics, the most outrageous  
East Anglia email excerpts appear to suggest respected scientists  
misleadingly manipulated data and suppressed legitimate argument in  
peer-reviewed journals.

These claims are forcefully denied, but the correspondents do little  
to enhance confidence in either the integrity or the professionalism  
of the university’s climatologists. What is more, there are no denials  
around the researchers’ repeated efforts to avoid meaningful  
compliance with several requests under the UK Freedom of Information  
Act to gain access to their working methods. Indeed, researchers were  
asked to delete and destroy emails. Secrecy, not privacy, is at the  
rotten heart of this bad behavior by ostensibly good scientists.

Why should research funding institutions and taxpayers fund scientists  
who deliberately delay, obfuscate and deny open access to their  
research? Why should scientific journals publish peer-reviewed  
research where the submitting scientists have not made every  
reasonable effort to make their work – from raw data to sophisticated  
computer simulations – as transparent and accessible as possible? Why  
should responsible policymakers in America, Europe, Asia and Latin  
America make decisions affecting people’s health, wealth and future  
based on opaque and inaccessible science?

They should not. The issue here is not about good or bad science, it  
is about insisting that scientists and their work be open and  
transparent enough so that research can be effectively reviewed by  
broader communities of interest. Open science minimises the likelihood  
and consequences of bad science.

Debilitating and even fatal side-effects of new drugs might have been  
detected sooner if pharmaceutical companies had been compelled to  
share data on all the trials they ran, not just favourable ones.  
Similarly, the flawed and successfully overturned 1999 child murder  
conviction of Sally Clark might never have occurred if the statistical  
errors made by expert witness pediatrician Sir Roy Meadow had been  
questioned earlier. Data withholding played a distortive and  
destructive role in the cold fusion frenzy 20 years ago, when two  
scientists announced they had produced energy by cold fusion, only to  
be widely and quickly denounced by the scienitific community.  
Concealment and secrecy invites mischief; too many scientists seeking  
influence accept the invitation.

Achieving this is simple and inexpensive. It is not done by more  
rigorous enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act, although that  
would help. It comes from branding “openness” into every link of the  
scientific research value chain. Public or tax-deductible research  
funding should be contingent upon maximum transparency.

Scientists and affiliated institutions that will not make the research  
process as transparent as the end result will be asked to return the  
money or risk denial of future funds. University accreditation should  
be contingent not just upon faculty research and publication but by  
demonstrating policies and practices that champion data sharing.  
Professional societies and journals should make data sharing a  
condition of membership and publication. Researchers must be pushed to  
be more open at every step of their process.

The Royal Society not only makes data sharing a precondition of  
publication, it provides up to 10 megabytes of free space for  
supplementary data on its website. Unfortunately, too many scientific  
societies and publishers are less than rigorous or insistent about  
openness. Strip them of their tax-deductible status. Make opennes a  
condition of tax advantage. Of course commercial and proprietary  
issues can influence the manner of data sharing and transparency. But  
the East Anglia emails represent an individual and institutional  
imperative to err on the side of minimal disclosure even as  
researchers sought to maximise the academic and political impact of  
their work. That is perverse.

Public interest suggests scientists and their sponsoring institutions  
be made as legally, financially, professionally and ethically as  
uncomfortable as possible about concealing and withholding relevant  
research information.

If the University of East Anglia had been sharing more of its data and  
the computer models and statistical simulations running that data, the  
email hack would have been much ado about nothing.

When doing important research about the potential future of the  
planet, scientists should have nothing to hide. Their obligation to  
the truth is an obligation to openness.

The writer researches the economics of innovation and technology  
transfer at MIT and is a visiting researcher at London’s Imperial  
College


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