Donald Trump has signed an Executive Order nominally aimed at “Restoring Gold Standard Science”. Setting aside the absurdity of “restoring” something that never existed, what does that purport to mean?
Gold Standard Science means science conducted in a manner that is:
(i) reproducible;
(ii) transparent;
(iii) communicative of error and uncertainty;
(iv) collaborative and interdisciplinary;
(v) skeptical of its findings and assumptions;
(vi) structured for falsifiability of hypotheses;
(vii) subject to unbiased peer review;
(viii) accepting of negative results as positive outcomes; and
(ix) without conflicts of interest.
It seems like someone in the Trump administration has been following the debate about how the “replication crisis” and reading op-eds in Nature about institutionally mandating the rules of sceince.
Somewhat counterintuitively, however, the “Open Science” reform community that had been publically excoriating science for not doing the things now (provisionally) mandated by the government things is outraged.