"Professor Coyne has asked to reanalyse the data from our clinical trial. By doing so he is accusing us of incompetence or dishonesty in our original analysis, in a campaign of vexatious partisan harassment. We decline the request for access, which is bad-faith and unscientific, otherwise Professor Coyne would not have made it."
The backstory here is that James Coyne is acknowledged as an expert in statistical methods and the ways they can trick us if we are insufficiently vigilant. He features, for instance, in the saga of Frederickson and her positive-thinking-modifies-genes junkscience shitstorm (which in turn demonstrated that in certain fields of academic psychology, repeated and egregious displays of credulous incompetence are ornaments rather than obstacles to one's career, as long as one sneaks them into PNAS).
McCrone et al., having conducted the PACE study, reported that a regimen of healthy exercise and tough-love no-nonsense counselling is a cost-effective treatment -- indeed, the only effective treatment -- for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. They published their conclusions through an on-line PLoS journal, promising to abide by that publisher's policy that "underlying data should be made freely available for researchers to use".
There is only one catch -- it's the best catch there is -- the data are only available as long as no-one asks for them.
[H/t RetractionWatch]
It is like discovering a hitherto-unknown, unpublished work by Kafka.
4 comments:
"Professor Coyne has asked to reanalyse the data from our clinical trial. By doing so he is accusing us of incompetence or dishonesty in our original analysis..."
Our refusal clearly confirms our competence and honesty.
Our refusal clearly confirms our competence and honesty.
The saga continues, with other researchers chiming in at RW and at Coyne's blog, reporting the reasons they had been given for the unavailability of the data. Including:
-- Too much trouble to calculate the requested statistics.
-- Requester is not sufficiently qualified as a health economist to interpret data.
-- Subjects had been promised that their responses would be sequestered in perpetuity.
-- Requester had come back with a second request -- modified to make it less trouble to answer -- making her a vexatious harasser.
-- Researchers have a timetable of publication for their own future uses of the data, so can't let someone else take precedence.
-- Requester shows a hostile lack of confidence in our own analyses.
The common element is that the data are freely available as long as no-one asks for them.
Also too, "Did we say we'd get back to you in 20 days? HA HA we meant 20 working days."
That is nothing short of BRILLIANT!
I don't know if they're good at science, but they're GREAT at dissemination.
They really deserve their own Catch designation. At LEAST Catch 23.
Don't tell them, but I'm going to abscond with this approach and use it regularly in my professional life...
I suspect that the PACErs are about to be hoist on Coyne's petard.
Academically, it doesn't really matter how long the PACErs can block access to the data, since no one not dependent on the MRC Psychiatric mafia now trusts them, but further delay in letting the assumptions run free will keep the fact-free areas of psychiatry and economics from losing some public funding for some time yet - and the is the aim of the authors.
Publication in The Lancet alone is enough to make me doubt it - and I've been published in The Lancet.
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