Its a good point Jean-Claude. To me the whole thing hinges on this negative control and whether it was done thoroughly enough. Without having the raw data it is very hard to see through what is largely a set of accusations of misconduct and/or behaviour that falls short of 'best practice' of various different types.

I'm certainly not in favour of forcing people to make raw data available and rather more on the side of making the case as to why this should be the social norm. However I am conscious that progress on these issues is usually driven by journal submission requirements. These in turn need to be driven by community requests.

In a conversation a few weeks ago Timo Hannay (Nature Publishing Group) made the point that journals, even those such as Nature, cannot take it upon themselves to dictate behaviour, and indeed to do so would potentially be commercially inadvisable. They are in a 'market' for papers and if the costs go to high people will go elsewhere.

On the other hand there is a thin line between setting new 'community norms' which are supported by journals and compulsion. In most cases journals actually require that authors be prepared to make the data available already anyway.

My argument would be that we should be encouraging and supporting the deposition of raw data with papers, and developing the tools to make it easy. Over time this will develop to be the expected standard giving us a better record, a better literature, and more data in the public domain.

But I agree that simply setting a policy like this (however that might be done) would lead to the sort of double book keeping you suggest and would be a bad route to go down.