This is open-access week. Most already know they should be publishing in open-access journals and/or self-archiving their papers. But moving science towards open access has been… slow. I was going to write that things have been moving at a glacial pace, thinking that would be an exaggeration; but nowadays I worry the world’s glaciers may be moving/melting fast enough to be gone before open access is the norm.

When a scientific article is published, ideally the data behind the reported results should be made available. Anyone should be able to scrutinize the basis of scientific claims. While this has long been the ideal, it has rarely been practiced. But this has been changing, and momentum is building to actually require the posting of data in circumstances where it’s feasible.

More and more researchers agree that more access is needed to the original data behind published research articles. Of course, the more general point is that not just the original data, but all materials needed to scrutinize the claims of a manuscript should be available.

First were the Climategate emails. There, Lack of transparency in climate data analyses and climate models contributed to the doubts of skeptics regarding climate change, and made it easier for the skeptics to convince the public that there is good reason for skepticism. Now, the Marc Hauser affair has cast a shadow across another sub-area of science. How can we prevent these scientific fiascos from occurring in the future?