A commitment to act on data sharing

The argument is simple enough. Ensuring that research is registered in advance, the findings reported quickly, and the data and code shared readily is in the best interests of science and the public good. Ultimately, the public pays for the research enterprise, and the scientific community must be held accountable. But nothing that involves commercial interests, academic rivalry, political agendas, and the perverse incentives of scientific publishing is ever simple. What is simple and obvious, such as the importance of sharing data and code from research, rapidly becomes complex and insoluble (doi:10.1136/bmj.o102).1The movement for more openness and transparency in science, which The BMJ supports, is intimately connected to the movement for evidence based (or evidence informed) medicine, another cause that The BMJ is closely identified with (doi:10.1136/bmj.312.7023.71).2 Both serve the interests of science and the public. Yet both are often presented as idealistic and unpragmatic. In Gulliver’s Travels, our hero…
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