Bench Press

The always thoughtful Deepak Singh brings up a great point in a recent post on his personal blog:

Not all data should be published via a peer-reviewed publication. Not every protocol needs to be. But making the data available via wikis, open data resources is pretty much a no-brainer and not just for the future. You enrich currently available data, and have the ability to leverage an additional layer of resources.

Deepak isn’t the only guy to think this, Derek Lowe from In the Pipeline raised a similar point:

Perhaps there should be a way to dump chemical data directly into some archives, the way X-ray data goes into the Protein Data Bank. That wouldn’t count for much, but it would capture things for future use. Having it not count much would decrease the incentive for anyone to fill it full of fakery, too, since there would be even less point than usual. And before anyone objects to having a big pile of non-peer-reviewed chemical data like this, keep in mind that we already have one: it’s called the patent literature, and it can be quite worthwhile.

(all emphases mine)

I think they both have a very good point. Some form of centralized data repository, even if non-peer reviewed, could help tackle the problem that everyone hears about but nobody ever tries to solve of not having a central place to share negative results and protocols (akin to what this blog proposed previously for bio/pharma companies).

It could also help us re-prioritize publication and peer review efforts away from sheer data collation which, while extremely important, is distinct from experimental/study design, data analyses, and drawing conclusions where peer-review is more valuable (there’s only so much peer-review can do to when looking at a data collection effort in isolation).

With modern internet technologies being as fast and as scalable as they are now, there’s simply no reason to use the traditional journal to chronicle every single discovery or achievement. Better to collect most of it in API-accessible/index-able repositories so that others can share in it and curate it and instead focus publications on building analytical insights.

(Image credit)