Providing access to the data is a prerequisite for replication of empirical analysis. Unfortunately, this access is not always granted to everyone (see here, and here). There is evidence that some of this may be due to concerns about requestors’ qualifications (see here). In two recent papers, we investigated how willingness to share depended on the identity of the requestor.
In a recent interview on Retraction Watch, Andrew Gelman reveals that what keeps him up at night isn’t scientific fraud, it’s “the sheer number of unreliable studies — uncorrected, unretracted — that have littered the literature.” He then goes on to argue that retractions cannot be the answer. His argument is simple.