A Kansas University professor of economics is in the middle of a slowly simmering debate with a University of Texas at Dallas professor who accuses him and a colleague of suspect research in a 2004 paper.From the Chronicle of Higher Education: _The paper’s authors – Felix Oberholzer-Gee, now an associate professor at Harvard Business School, and Koleman S. Strumpf, now a professor of economics at the University of Kansas – had persuaded an open-source file-sharing network known as OpenNap to give them a huge cache of raw user data from the last several months of 2002. They then counted songs that were illegally downloaded and the sales of CD’s that contained those songs. They looked especially at how CD sales varied during weeks when songs were more easily available on the file-sharing network (because European students were on vacation and therefore spending more time online). The paper’s bottom line: File sharing had no net effect on sales._Then Stan J. Liebowitz, a professor of economics at Universty of Texas at Dallas, became one of the foremost critics of the paper. A sign of the Internet age, the debate has been ramped up as Liebowitz took his criticism to the Social Science Research Network.Liebowitz argued that the study should be discredited because Stumpf and Oberholzer-Gee wouldn’t release their data so others could replicate their results.Strumpf told me over the phone Wednesday afternoon that he staunchly stood by his research and said the only way he and Oberholzer-Gee could have received the data was by agreeing to not release it.However, Strumpf said other academics have replicated the same results with BigChampagne, an online site which measures similar data and is open to those willing to pay.The original article goes into [much more detail on the debate.][1]