The Wayforward Machine

The bunnies, being young, have the habit of believing that what they see is the way it always was. Bishop Hill has an amusing post (UPDATE: and an acknowledgment of this post) example of this fallacy where he goes after Nature and Phil Jones

Nature has an editorial on the Climategate anniversary to add to its recent profile of Phil Jones.

For critics of CRU and their, sometimes legitimate, complaints about data access to be taken seriously, they must be more specific about who should be more open with what, and address their concerns at the correct target. It remains the case that many of the data used by CRU scientists are covered by agreements that prevent their wider distribution. This is not ideal, but it is hardly the fault of the CRU researchers — even if they did seem reluctant to share.

This is an extraordinary thing to say. Jones et al 1990 was published in Nature. Nature requires authors to make data available on request. How can they argue that it was restricted by confidentiality agreements?

Eli, trying to be a nice Rabett, pointed out in a comment, that Nature's policy on materials and methods only was established in January 1997

As a condition of publication authors are required to make materials and methods used freely available to academic researchers for their own use.

Before that, the only condition was that authors were that

Nature requests authors to deposit sequence and x-ray crystallography data in the databases that exist for this purpose.

Now anyone interested could go a few rounds about what constitutes an academic researcher, or whether means means means (gottcha) or software, but what is clear is that there was no data sharing condition established in 1990 for articles published in Nature, and to demean (again) people for not obeying rules that did not exist is so very Bishop Hill

Oh yes, the good clergy appears to have deposited Eli's comment directly into the memory hole, but one may always hope for resurrection.

UPDATE: The current Nature policy is (and the observant may note the changes)

An inherent principle of publication is that others should be able to replicate and build upon the authors' published claims. Therefore, a condition of publication in a Nature journal is that authors are required to make materials, data and associated protocols promptly available to readers without undue qualifications in material transfer agreements. Any restrictions on the availability of materials or information must be disclosed to the editors at the time of submission. Any restrictions must also be disclosed in the submitted manuscript, including details of how readers can obtain materials and information. If materials are to be distributed by a for-profit company, this must be stated in the paper.