My point is that we need more transparency in science:
- ALL data should be readily available, at least within the academic community.
- Research should be judged based on the quality of the work, not on the direction of the results. Sometimes well-designed experiments fail to reject the null hypothesis. That's why do science.
It's doable! Here's why:
- Data storage is cheap. My entire Master's takes up about $20 worth of hard drive space, including 20 subjects' worth of whole-brain fMRI data.
- We have the Internet, via which information can be easily and cheaply shared
- There are far more researchers than funding sources. For example, agencies like the NIH fund an enormous fraction of biomedical research in the U.S. (28% from the NIH as of 2003). Creating a centralized community of data-sharing should be easy when the money is all coming from the same place.
Done ranting; time to go back to determining the locus of the soul. Wish me luck.
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