I agree. Separating analysis from data gathering is generally a bad idea (especially if anyone with Matlab is doing the "analysis"). Having signed hypothesis an

I agree. Separating analysis from data gathering is generally a bad idea (especially if anyone with Matlab is doing the "analysis"). Having signed hypothesis and methods before data collection would be good. In that case different labs could do the acquisition (as long as methods for acquisition and analysis are established before hand). Even better to make the acquisition part double blind. There is a strong infrastructure to do this with medicine, but a lot of scientific study require technical expertise that is limited. In medicine there are hundreds (thousands?) of labs or more that can do a double blind study. In a narrow scientific field there may be only a few experts in the world. It is a difficult problem, but I do think there are better ways to organize scientific study.