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Publication bias. Reproducibility problem. Abusing statistical tests.

These are some of the many criticisms received by all fields of science for a long time. If I read an article in Psychological Science and am sceptical of their results, or if I want to apply another statistical technique to see if the results remain convincing to me, I can't. I need to run another experiment. Or if I want to conduct a meta-analysis, maybe having other researchers' raw data is better than just the mean/CI they report in journals.

If scientists' mission is for the public good and for the advancement of knowledge, why don't they publish their results in raw (of course they need to remove research participants' privacy information)? They shouldn't be afraid of others' criticising their work. Only truth can endure the testing of time.

Nowadays, with the prevalence (and low price) of online storage platform and sophisticated database management, why don't they do it for the public's good?

EDIT: by raw data, I mean to make the dataset public and accessible to everyone (well... at least researchers)

EDIT: Thank you for everyone’s input. As I come from the field of psychology, and the practice of making out data available is not common, I wrongly assumed that it is also true for other fields...

JetLag
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    This is a very good question. I just don't think it's a good fit for CrossValidated (and I have voted for closing). I'd encourage you to re-post it at [Academia.SE](https://academia.stackexchange.com/), best in their ["data" tag](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data). Good luck! – Stephan Kolassa Oct 11 '17 at 07:09
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    One short answer is that many researchers do make their data available. The blanket implication that researchers don't is an exaggeration. We understand that your question is about those who don't yet, but there is no gain from imprecise or exaggerated claims. – Nick Cox Oct 11 '17 at 07:32
  • Another short answer is the following. Researchers often need need to put in effort, money and time to collect the data, while also and most importantly, taking responsibility for the data's validity at publication and thereafter. If this data would be shared openly, unrelated researchers who did not 'invest' in the data, would be able to 'profit' without these responsibilities. This might be seen as unfair. I do not say I completely support this sentiment, but I can at least understand where this is coming from. – IWS Oct 11 '17 at 07:54
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    Very relevant figure: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002456.g002 – amoeba Oct 11 '17 at 07:56
  • There is a discussion of all this in the Wikipedia article on Open Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data which might be interesting. – mdewey Oct 11 '17 at 08:17

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