Despite pushes to make research more open, a new study finds that researchers are less willing to share some study details with others than they previously had been, Nature Medicine's Spoonful of Medicine blog reports.
The survey posed theoretical questions to some 390 researchers who had published work in the Annals of Internal Medicine between 2008 and 2012. While about 70 percent of respondents were willing to share their protocols and statistical methods beyond what was included in their paper, just more than half of those surveyed said they would share their full dataset.
Previous surveys, though, indicated a greater willingness to share, the Spoonful of Medicine points out. In 2008, 80 percent of respondents said they would share further information regarding their protocols, and in 2012, 60 percent said that they would. "It was surprising to find that people seem less willing to share in more recent times," says Christine Laine, the editor-in-chief of the Annals of Internal Medicine, who presented the results at the International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, according to Nature Medicine.