Open-Access Economics by Barry Eichengreen - Project Syndicate - 0 views
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in a discipline that regards ingenuity as the ultimate virtue, those who engage in the grunt work of data cleaning and replication receive few rewards. Nobel prizes are not awarded for constructing new historical estimates of GDP that allow policy analysis to be extended back in time.
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How could a flawed study have appeared first in the prestigious working-paper series of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and then in a journal of the American Economic Association? And, if this was possible, why should policymakers and a discerning public vest any credibility in economic research?CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphIt was possible because economists are not obliged to make their data and programs publicly available when publishing scientific research. It is said that NBER working papers are even more prestigious than publication in refereed journals. Yet the Bureau does not require scholars to post their data and programs to its Web site as a condition for working-paper publication.
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Statistics are helpful. But in economics, as in other lines of social inquiry, they are no substitute for proper historical analysis.
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"Big data promises big progress. But large data sets also make replication impossible without the author's cooperation. And the incentive for authors to cooperate is, at best, mixed. It is therefore the responsibility of editorial boards and the directors of organizations like the NBER to make open access obligatory."