Comment Re:Bad news for ecologists--new license needed (Score 4, Insightful) 136
On the other hand, if I don't have your data I can't check your results. If you want to keep your data secret for a decade, you really should plan to not publish anything relying on it for that time either. Release all the papers when you release the data.
Also, who gets to decide when a study is a replication and when it is a new result? Few replication attempts are doing exactly the same thing as the original paper, for good reason. If you want to see if it holds up you want to use different analysis or similar anyway. And "use" data? What if another group produces their own data and compares with yours? Is that "using" the data? What if they compare your published results? Is that using it?
A partial solution, I think, is for a group such as yours to pre-plan the data use already when collecting it. So you decide from start to publish a subset of that data early and publish papers based on that. Then publish another subset for further results and so on.
But what we really need is for data to be fully citeable. A way to publish the data as a reserach result by itself - perhaps the data, together with a paper describing it (but not any analysis). ANyone is free to use the data for their own research, but will of course cite you when they do. A good, serious data set can probably rack up more citations than just about any paper out there. That will give the producers the scientific credit it deserves.