Data sharing ethics

Andrew Gelman has a new column in Chance magazine on statistical ethics. I like his take on data sharing as an ethical responsibility:

... sharing data is central to scientific ethics. If you really believe your results, you should want your data out in the open. If, on the other hand, you have a sneaking suspicion that maybe there’s something there you don’t want to see, and then you keep your raw data hidden, it’s a problem.

The National Science Foundation has a new data management policy that supports this view explicitly, and many journals in my field are going down the same path of requiring raw data to be shared. This is new and difficult territory for many though, and it will be interesting to see how things play out.