Researchers are increasingly reluctant to share the background details of their studies with other scientists according to new results from a survey of authors who published papers in the Annals of Internal Medicine in the last five years. This downward trend in researchers’ willingness to disclose such information is, unfortunately, at odds with the current surge in efforts to facilitate access to the types of study specifics that are vital to reproducing results.

Increasing transparency in research—by sharing the nitty-gritty details of studies that don’t make it into the published accounts, such as preliminary qualifying test results for clinical trial participants—is a hot topic. A report released on 29 March by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) based in Washington, DC, entitled “Sharing Clinical Research Data: A Workshop,” concluded that giving other scientists access to information from studies was increasingly important for the research community. But the report did acknowledge that researchers sometimes have fears that the data they share, for example clinical results, might be misused or misinterpreted if not enough attention is given to how the data were originally collected.

“The biomedical industry lags behind the rest of the world in how we share information,” says Sharon Terry, chair of the IOM workshop committee and president of the Genetic Alliance, a Washington, DC-based health advocacy group that focuses on issues related to gene testing. “We need to catch up with the other industries that have figured out ways to share data and still protect it.”

In the new survey, a majority of researchers said that they would be willing to share study materials with their colleagues, according to the results presented by Christine Laine, the editor-in-chief of the Annals of Internal Medicine, at the International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication held in Chicago today.

The findings came from theoretical questions answered by 389 respondents who published papers in the Annals of Internal Medicine between 2008 and 2012. During that period, 71% said they would share their study protocols beyond what was in the methods, and 72% were willing to share the full statistical methods used to analyze the data, including the computer algorithms employed. However, only 54% were willing to share all the data collected during the study, including information that didn’t end up being in the final report. Most of the researchers who answered the survey questions also added extra provisos under which they would share these types of information; for example some would only do so in response to a personal request from an interested party (rather than depositing the information in, for example, an online data bank).

Downward trend

What concerns the surveyors most is that over the five-year survey period the responses showed a noticeable decline in scientists’ willingness to share details about their study protocols. Based on the replies to the theoretical questions, around 80% of the survey respondents in 2008 said they would share additional details about their study protocols, beyond what is described in the methods section of the paper, but by 2012 only 60% were willing to provide colleagues with that information, a significant difference. There was a similar—but not statistically significant—slip in researchers’ willingness to share data. When the survey started, about 60% of researchers said they’d share raw data, but five years later that number had dropped to 45%.

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Most scientists will say that they go to the lab every day out of a pure love of science, not to make buckets of money. But for researchers at the pinnacle of their fields, science can be a lucrative trade. Win a Nobel Prize, and you could take home more than $1.2 million. Bag a Templeton Prize, and you could be depositing a $1.7 million check. Net a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, first awarded earlier this year, and you’d walk away with a cool $3 million.

But that’s nothing compared to the €4 million ($5.1 million) purse attached to the Else Kröner-Fresenius Award, a new prize handed out today by the German non-profit Else Kröner-Fresenius-Stiftung (EKFS). Although €3.5 million of the prize money is intended for future research (leaving only €500,000 for the recipient to use as he or she pleases) the total value of new award makes it the most valuable single accolade in all of science, monetarily at least.

That accolade was given to immunologist Ruslan Medzhitov, a Russian-born scientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who co-discovered and characterized mammalian Toll-like receptors (TLRs) in the 1990s. These pattern recognition molecules are now recognized as integral parts of the innate immune system that fight off microbial infections and detect associated damage. Many drug companies are actively targeting these receptors in the hopes of treating cancer, sepsis and inflammatory disease.

Two years ago, Medzhitov (pictured) was controversially overlooked for the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which went to the discoverer of dendritic cells (Ralph Steinman) and two other immunologists who elucidated key aspects of innate immunity (Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffmann, with whom Medzhitov shared the 2011 Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine, the $1 million ‘Nobel Prize of the East’). At the time, 24 scientists wrote an open letter in Nature arguing that Medzhitov and his mentor Charles Janeway, who died in 2003, should have been recognized by the Nobel Committee for their seminal contribution of cloning a human TLR and showing that it activated signaling pathways that induce adaptive immunity.

However, according to Stefan Kaufmann, director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, the Nobel snub had no effect on Medzhitov’s selection for the new award. Medzhitov “was clearly one of more innovative researchers,” says Kaufmann, who, as president of the International Union of Immunological Societies, served as chair of the award’s executive committee. Plus, he notes, the Else Kröner-Fresenius Award recognizes both past achievements and ongoing research activity, and Medzhitov has an active research program that could aid in the development of new vaccines and anti-inflammatory medicines. (See this commentary that Kaufmann cowrote last year in Nature Immunology for more background on the award.)

The inaugural immunology-themed award was timed to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the death of EKFS founder Else Kröner. Going forward, the foundation expects to grant the award every four years to a different discipline of medical research.