Shorter McCrone et al.: "Here are the conclusions from our clinical trial. The raw data are available to anyone with good-faith, scientific motives."
"Professor Coyne has asked to reanalyse the data from our clinical trial. By doing so he is accusing us of incompetence or dishonesty in our original analysis, in a campaign of vexatious partisan harassment. We decline the request for access, which is bad-faith and unscientific, otherwise Professor Coyne would not have made it."
The backstory here is that James Coyne is acknowledged as an expert in statistical methods and the ways they can trick us if we are insufficiently vigilant. He features, for instance, in the saga of Frederickson and her positive-thinking-modifies-genes junkscience shitstorm (which in turn demonstrated that in certain fields of academic psychology, repeated and egregious displays of credulous incompetence are ornaments rather than obstacles to one's career, as long as one sneaks them into PNAS).
McCrone et al., having conducted the PACE study, reported that a regimen of healthy exercise and tough-love no-nonsense counselling is a cost-effective treatment -- indeed, the only effective treatment -- for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. They published their conclusions through an on-line PLoS journal, promising to abide by that publisher's policy that "underlying data should be made freely available for researchers to use".
There is only one catch -- it's the best catch there is -- the data are only available as long as no-one asks for them.
"Professor Coyne has asked to reanalyse the data from our clinical trial. By doing so he is accusing us of incompetence or dishonesty in our original analysis, in a campaign of vexatious partisan harassment. We decline the request for access, which is bad-faith and unscientific, otherwise Professor Coyne would not have made it."
The backstory here is that James Coyne is acknowledged as an expert in statistical methods and the ways they can trick us if we are insufficiently vigilant. He features, for instance, in the saga of Frederickson and her positive-thinking-modifies-genes junkscience shitstorm (which in turn demonstrated that in certain fields of academic psychology, repeated and egregious displays of credulous incompetence are ornaments rather than obstacles to one's career, as long as one sneaks them into PNAS).
McCrone et al., having conducted the PACE study, reported that a regimen of healthy exercise and tough-love no-nonsense counselling is a cost-effective treatment -- indeed, the only effective treatment -- for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. They published their conclusions through an on-line PLoS journal, promising to abide by that publisher's policy that "underlying data should be made freely available for researchers to use".
There is only one catch -- it's the best catch there is -- the data are only available as long as no-one asks for them.
[H/t RetractionWatch]