Eli Rabett has challenged my post about Phil Jones claim that publication of his data was prevented by confidentiality agreements. I said that Nature requires authors to make their data available on request.
Eli's says that Nature only instituted this policy in 1997, and that previously the policy was only that:
Nature requests authors to deposit sequence and x-ray crystallography data in the databases that exist for this purpose.
If so then I stand corrected. I'm not sure that it changes anything very much though, because, as we know, CRU have been unable to produce any agreements that would prevent publication, we know that release would have been required under both FOI and EIR, and we know that they distributed data quite happily to scientists who they saw as onside.