To echo the meme around here, there appears to be an opportunity here for a startup :)<p>If you can get buy-in from the research community, even in one niche field, I could see great utility in a central escrow house of sorts, where people can post research software, datasets, etc. and others can download the stuff and validate the results <i>only</i> after agreeing in some reasonably binding way not to use that information to scoop or copy the original researcher.<p>Buy-in in this case means that everybody should have to do it to publish in a certain venue.  You might even do something fancy like providing people access to a VPS which will run the server without allowing validators to <i>scp</i> everything back to their own machines.  Of course this is impossible to do perfectly; once you allow people to view the data in a text editor or hex dump, it is all over in a strict sense (scripts + screen-scraping), but it is still a step up from just handing over the files, and keeps honest people honest.<p>You might also provide some anonymization/randomization service for datasets (for instance, by applying an unknown linear transform to absolute numbers in the case that the results don't change, similar to what was done here: <a href="http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-cluster-data.html" rel="nofollow">http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/01/google-cluster-da...</a> .<p>I think there are 2 reasons why researchers can be reluctant to share:<p>1) They are afraid of getting scooped by somebody else leveraging all the effort they put into developing the tools and curating the data and leapfrogging them.<p>2) Their results are suspect.<p>Such an escrow house would ameliorate the concern behind 1) and help suss out 2)  :)<p>Anyone else have thoughts on this?