What physicists propose and other fields already do

Physicists have asked for most of this. Economics, crystallography, structural biology and particle physics already run versions of it.

Inside the field

The Pittsburgh report, published in Physical Review B in March 2026, gives recommendations for researchers, publishers, universities and funders. It asks for primary data with every paper, full parameter ranges, the number of samples tested, and data access for every co-author.¹^,2

1 Akrap et al. 2026, Physical Review B 113, 119601 AI only

The Pittsburgh report was published in Physical Review B (113, 119601) on 20 March 2026 and gives recommendations for researchers, publishers, universities and research laboratories, and government and funding organizations, drawn from a conference at the University of Pittsburgh on 9 to 11 May 2024. Open the source Confidence: confident.

2 Akrap, Frolov et al. 2026, Report on reproducibility in condensed matter physics, sections II and V.1 AI only

The report recommends that authors release as much primary data as possible and practical, sharing materials in the form they have them when full FAIR standards aren't possible; include the full ranges of experimental parameters studied, all reasonable presentations of the data, all plausible interpretations and the number of samples tested; and give all authors access to all primary data and analysis files before they consent to publication. Open the source Confidence: confident.

It also asks funders to consider paying for replications, publishers to set acceptance criteria for replication papers, and universities to count datasets and code as research outputs. I see the assistant as a smaller, cheaper first step toward the report's goals, meant to sit alongside it.³

Frolov's group practices what it recommends. He found and sent a colleague 15-year-old raw data in under 20 minutes, and tells his students to be ready to do the same. He points to astrophysics, where sharing data is normal.⁴

In other fields

Each of these already does part of what this proposal builds toward: a neutral home for data, a check before publication, or a norm the whole field came to follow.

AEA Data and Code Repository Economics

Authors of empirical papers accepted by AEA journals deposit their data and code in a shared repository run by a university data archive, and the Data Editor reruns every one with a computational component before publication, about 400 articles a year.⁵^,6

A society can require deposit with a neutral host and check before publishing.

5 AEA Data and Code Repository, openICPSR AI only

Authors of empirical papers accepted by AEA journals deposit their data and code in the AEA Data and Code Repository at openICPSR, where the AEA Data Editor reruns them before acceptance. Scope: Economics. Open the source Confidence: confident.

6 Vilhuber 2024, Report of the AEA Data Editor, AEA Papers and Proceedings 114 AI only

The AEA Data Editor's lab checks the replication package of every article with a computational component in AEA journals before publication (Papers and Proceedings get a cursory review) and handles about 400 articles a year; from December 2022 to November 2023 it received 646 verification requests covering 527 manuscripts. Scope: Economics; American Economic Association journals only. Open the source Confidence: confident.

ClinicalTrials.gov Medicine

Since 2005 the major medical journals consider a trial only if it was registered in a public registry, such as the one run by the US National Library of Medicine, before the first patient enrolled.⁷

Journals can make a time-stamped plan a condition of publication, and a field can move to it quickly.

Crystal structure deposition Chemistry and crystallography

Authors deposit structure files before publication, where they stay confidential but open to referees, and an automated check flags inconsistencies for reviewers.⁸

Reviewer-only access and automated checks already work for physical-science data.

Protein Data Bank Structural biology

Since 1989, no deposit, no structure paper: reviewers get an automated validation report while the data stays unreleased, and deposit is free to authors. Decades later the archive trained AlphaFold.⁹^,10

A field-wide archive, publicly funded, can become a condition of publication, and pays off in ways nobody planned.

NOMAD Materials and condensed matter

Germany's materials data platform lets uploads be shared read-only with reviewers, embargoed for up to three years, and frozen once published.¹¹

The closest existing home in this field, built for its data formats.

HEPData Particle physics

A university-hosted, publicly funded archive holds the numbers behind the plots of several thousand papers, each checked by a reviewer before release.¹²

Physics already has a third-party home for a whole subfield's published data.

Institute for Replication Economics and political science

A mass reproduction of 110 papers found more than 85% of claims computationally reproducible, and 72% of significant results held up under robustness checks.¹³

A field can measure its own reproducibility, cheaply and at scale.