Steve McIntyre takes up another case of somebody publishing a paper but refusing access to the data the paper is said to be based on at http://climateaudit.org/2011/01/06/more-data-refusal-nothing-changes/.
I have always found my simple and absolutely reliable demarcator between science and faith as being the words ” I believe that….”. The moment any statement is a matter of “belief” rather than ” a conclusion drawn from the evidence” it becomes a matter of faith rather than of “science”.
The moment an author cannot – for whatever reason – provide the data he has used then he is asking the reader to rely on “faith” or “trust” that the data does exist and is not faked or imagined or invented. For the reader the matter immediately descends to becoming a question of “belief” in the author if nothing else. And the author is surely not God to command an unquestioning belief.
- Whenever an author refuses access to his data he reduces his own conclusions from being matters of science to becoming matters of “faith”.
- When such a paper is said to be peer-reviewed then it reduces the group of peers to be little more than the acolytes to a faith.
- When a journal publishes a paper without insisting that the data be archived and accessible then it reduces the journal in which the paper is being published to being no more than the parish magazine for a cult.
The k2p blog 
September 26, 2011 at 2:41 am
I could not think you are more right