Concluding that:

Approaching the problem under the premise that fuller transparency is always desirable may not be the right place to start.

an article On the Social Cost of Transparency in Monetary Economies from the St Louis Fed explains why secrecy and non-disclosure of data may be advantageous.

For an asset economy then, the prescription of “full transparency” is not generally warranted.

After many pages of mathematics, their argument is summarized:

In competitive economies, the disclosure of high-frequency information unrelated to an asset’s “long-run fundamentals” may be detrimental to economic welfare when claims to such assets serve as high-velocity payment instruments. The equilibrium price of a liquid asset is excessively volatile when asset prices capitalize all information.

If we translate this into a more familiar example, such as climate data and code, it would seem to argue that disclosure of all data and code may be detrimental to the value of the research to the author of an article, the university, the journal, coauthors etc.

Attempting to optimize the value of the research explains non-disclosure. This is because — in an econocentric view — researchers with an “equity share” in products of research may use these “tokens” as a medium of exchange.

For example, where co-authorship might be exchanged for access to private data or code, this enhances promotion or further grants. But the value of the researcher’s equity share becomes “excessively volatile” when all available information is factored into the asset, i.e. when it becomes known that the code is a mess, the data set is composed of only 7 trees, etc., its value diminishes. This information is some-what divorced from the “long-run fundamental value” of the research program.

Suppressing this high-frequency information flow stabilizes the short-run expected return of a monetary instrument (around its long-run fundamentals), so that consumers are never caught short of “cash” in bad news events.

Therefore, the excuse for non-responsiveness to FOI requests used in the Nature editorial Climatologists under pressure does not present the full picture.

If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts. Governments and institutions need to provide tangible assistance for researchers facing such a burden.

Sad to see Nature perpetuating the ‘moral hazard’ of name-calling. But apart from that, they think the problem with disclosure is the uncompensated distribution cost, but not the uncompensated loss of asset value. Taking the analysis of David Andolfatto even further, one could argue that climatologists should be compensated for the loss of value of their equity share in the data and code, as a result of full disclosure.

Its not as crazy as it sounds. Fund the private research, then fund the disclosure of the products separately. If the research project fails, there is no cost to the public from the additional archival premium. Generally, financial incentives are needed and provide the additional push to complement the strategy of badgering people to do the right thing. The carrot and stick.