Interestingly, the current universal data sharing and data publishing agenda in the research space was not initiated out of any specific drivers for validation and replication. It was the 2007 OECD Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding which declared data as a public good that pushed action forward. the large-scale international Human Genome Project in which “openly accessible information is being used successfully by many different users, all over the world, for china rcs data a great variety of purposes”. This ideology promotes value for money through more and subsequent analysis of data, opportunities for collaboration and comparison, richer exposure of methods and finally validation.
The shift in semantics from open access to transparency in this research space is important but, in some ways, also troublesome. It is important to counter mistrust in research findings, eroded by the few abuses of trust in peer-reviewed reputable psychology publications in the Netherlands from unverifiable results and faking of data; and the push to encourage fairness in the even publication of clinical trials, such as the AllTrials campaign championed by Ben Goldacre. Yet I cannot help but see another impending ‘attack’ on qualitative research, for which it is harder to demonstrate transparency, in the scientific sense. US scholars are already fearsome of the challenges of what they see as the wave of neoliberal accountability that they feel is damaging the nature of qualitative scholarly practice (see the 2016 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.