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© www.CartoonStock.com Yesterday I did something I've never done before in many  years of publishing. When I submitted a revised manuscript of a research report to a journal, I also posted the dataset on the web, together with the script I'd used to extract the summary results. It was exciting. It felt as if I was part of a scientific revolution that has been gathering pace over the past two or three years, which culminated in adoption of a data policy by PLOS journals last February. This specified that authors were required to make the data underlying their scientific findings available publicly immediately upon publication of the article. As it happens, my paper is not submitted to PLOS, and so I'm not obliged to do this, but I wanted to, having considered the pros and cons. My decision was also influenced by the Wellcome Trust, who fund my work and encourage data sharing . The benefits are potentially huge. People usually think about the value to other researchers, who ...

What will the RDoC initiative by NIMH achieve? ©CartoonStock.com There's a lot wrong with current psychiatric classification. Every few years, the American Psychiatric Association comes up with a new set of labels and diagnostic criteria, but whereas the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used to be seen as some kind of Bible for psychiatrists, the latest version, DSM5, has been greeted with hostility and derision. The number of diagnostic categories keeps multiplying without any commensurate increase in the evidence base to validate the categories. It has been argued that vested interests from pharmaceutical companies create pressures to medicalise normality so that everyone will sooner or later have a diagnosis (Frances, 2013). And even excluding such conflict of interest, there are concerns that such well-known categories as schizophrenia and depression lack reliability and validity (Kendell & Jablensky, 2003). In 2013, Tom Insel, Director of the US funding agency, National I...