Åpne data ikke nok, programvaren bør også være åpen kildekode

Åpen data begynner å bli normen for stadig flere tidsskrifter, men dersom programvaren ikke også er åpen så kan det føre til at feil ikke kan bli korrigert likevel. Artikkelen "Why It Took Social Science Years to Correct a Simple Error About ‘Psychoticism’"  viser at feilen lå i programvaren ved at man skulle sette ja-svar til 1 og nei-svar til 0, og ikke omvendt:

Then, on March 4, 2015, he finally got access to some of Hatemi and Verhulst’s data, after the PLOS One paper was published, since that journal has an open-data policy. While the authors didn’t include information about how the variables should be coded, Ludeke simply took individual items on the psychoticism and other scales, determined intuitively how they should be coded (that is, setting “yes” answers to 1 and “no” answers to 0, as appropriate), and started crunching the numbers based on his interpretation. Voilà: His results were exactly opposite what Hatemi and Verhulst reported — meaning they were in line with the literature.