Last month, we reported on two retractions by the former neuroscience and physiology department chair at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. Both of the …

Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) -- The Journal of Irreproducible

"One condition: that the NIH establish a repository for the complete genetic information and make it available to researchers with legitimate interest in it. Just how that will be determined is also now being worked out."

More than 14 months after Blood issued a notice of concern about a paper by a Harvard stem cell scientist and her former post-doc, the journal has retracted the article. Here’s the notice for…

Hilarious stop-motion Lego video about Alice's struggles to retrieve (retired) Bob's data, and how the reBIND project might help.

If all funders required data sharing, it would be much more difficult to hide research fraud, writes Felicia B. LeClere.

Background The widespread reluctance to share published research data is often hypothesized to be due to the authors' fear that reanalysis may expose errors in their work or may produce conclusions that contradict their own. However, these hypotheses have not previously been studied systematically.   Methods and Findings We related the reluctance to share research data for reanalysis to 1148 statistically significant results reported in 49 papers published in two major psychology journals. We found the reluctance to share data to be associated with weaker evidence (against the null hypothesis of no effect) and a higher prevalence of apparent errors in the reporting of statistical results. The unwillingness to share data was particularly clear when reporting errors had a bearing on statistical significance.   Conclusions Our findings on the basis of psychological papers suggest that statistical results are particularly hard to verify when reanalysis is more likely to lead to contrasting conclusions. This highlights the importance of establishing mandatory data archiving policies.

Two years ago, Judy Mikovits had a paper in Science suggesting that chronic  …

As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years’ worth of hacked and deleted e‑mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now—and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future.

Latanya Sweeney is doing amazing CS work aimed at protecting individuals' medical privacy.

The denouement of the story. Yankaskas, still: "I don't know nothin' 'bout securin' no servers!"

Two researchers who set up doppelganger domains to mimic legitimate domains  …