There is also the question of how honest people will be when they are anonymous versus not. If you were studying cocaine use in America, publishing your identi

There is also the question of how honest people will be when they are anonymous versus not. If you were studying cocaine use in America, publishing your identified data (to enable double-checking the analysis) would give the cops a list of people who admitted to illegal drug usage. The current system with IRB allows for the collection of identified data. It also allows the data to be released, in full, as long as there is no way for an individual to be identified specifically. In some cases you can simply swap names for a participant ID (after randomly sorting the list). In other cases you have no choice but to publish some summary statistics because the data you collected is only applicable to a very small number of people in a small region, or there is enough data people could reverse-engineer likely participants of the study. Science is about self-correcting when errors are made. There are plenty of reasons to criticize the current incentive structure for academics, such as there being little funding to replicate other studies, but doing away with confidentiality is absolutely not the way to go about it.