Getting the scientific community to agree to almost anything makes herding cats look like a military parade. Even within a field, there are wildly varying opinions, and some fields tend to have higher or lower means. And thus far, I&#x27;m only talking about non-human where the primary concern is the ability to benefit from your own hard work without being &quot;scooped on the analysis&quot;. Patient data adds a whole new dimension---with just genome sequence data, it&#x27;s possible to infer someone&#x27;s last name [1]. So deidentification is not as trivial as you make it sound. You can remove the obvious factors, but there&#x27;s likely to be other things in there that you can&#x27;t or don&#x27;t know to remove that will inadvertently identify people.<p>None of this is to excuse the original authors or KCL, but it is worth remembering that science is huge, and no single policy will work for everyone. What I think. PLoS could do is, as an editorial position, require anyone publishing with them to have some &quot;close to raw&quot; data publicly available BEFORE the manuscript can be published. Would at be controversial? Sure, but I think it&#x27;s also in line with PLOS&#x27;s mission of making science accessible to the public.<p>[1]  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencemag.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;339&#x2F;6117&#x2F;321" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencemag.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;339&#x2F;6117&#x2F;321</a>