facilitate access to the data, including several on-line tools. It is possible to look up basic data on individual schools and to compare schools in a variety of ways, such as by having a similar characteristic (e.g., size; rural, suburban, or urban; etc.). NCES also provides a set of prerun tables that permit individuals to cut the tables in different directions, such as getting student scores by several different variables (Seastrom, 2003). These policies avail education researchers of opportunities to mine the extensive data sets collected by NCES, and do so in a way that protects the privacy and confidentiality of research participants.

Norms for data sharing in many of the physical and natural sciences are reinforced in their professional and disciplinary journals. In journals such as Science and Nature, once an article is published, the author has to make the data available to those who wish to replicate the results. In both of those publications, authors are required to provide their data arrayed in identified files that directly correspond to results reported in the tables and figures in the manuscript. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has a similar policy: the journal will also house the data if appropriate data repositories do not exist. If authors of published articles refuse to comply with requests for their data, the journal bars them from future publishing.

Similar traditions in the social and behavioral sciences and education journals are not as well established. There are exceptions, however. The American Economic Review, for example, has a policy similar to those in the Nature and Science. In addition, journals published by the APA require authors to provide the data relevant to their articles to competent researchers. There are problems implementing these sorts of policies, as well as issues associated with promoting replication and reanalysis even when such policies do exist. For example, although APA’s data-sharing policy had been in effect for 25 years, staff estimates that less than one-tenth of a percent (0.001) of available data are actually shared as the policy envisions (VandenBos, 2003).

In our view, this low rate of use among psychologists reflects a host of cultural barriers and institutional incentives structures that work against data sharing that also exist in education research. Data sharing directly