Re: Psychology must learn a lesson from fraud case

Dr. Wicherts makes a compelling case for a more open attitude amongst psychologists (and I think the discussion could be extended to other social sciences as well) for making data available for re-analysis. I share his experiences in having trouble getting data sets for re-analysis from other researchers, when I tried to demonstrate a specific data technique and wanted to use real data for that.
Sharing data with other researchers may raise a threshold for people to â&#x80&#x9cmessâ&#x80&#x9d with their data. However, I do have my doubts as to whether the obligatory archiving of raw data in online appendices as a precondition for publication is the solution to the fraud problem. Stapel could have uploaded his files in such a system, have them checked by colleagues, and get approval without them noticing anything strange in the data. Because, after all, with hundreds of publications per journal, how well would each individual article be checked in the process? And would an outsider be able to detect irregularities in the data? I believe that it is no coincidence that Stapelsâ&#x80&#x99 own PhD students, who were informed in detail about the procedures in his line of work, discovered his fraud. I doubt that an outsider would have been able to prove this, based on a raw data upload.
I think the definition of what would be considered raw data might also be problematic. In one of my studies, I have collected longitudinal paper and pencil data on more than 4000 subjects. The data were processed using Teleform, and scanned by a bulk scanner. After scanning and verification, I had to check the data and correct scanning mistakes, etc. Some of the data needed to be removed, as it was collected in subjects that were not eligible for this study. So what is raw data in this case? The cabinets full of completed forms that we have kept in our institution? The scanned data file that Teleform produced? The cleaned data file? The selection I finally made for analysis? Moreover, data is nowadays often collected in online systems, making it very difficult to really check what are the responses provided by the subjects and what adaptations the researchers might have made.