There are real issues in academia, but I disagree that what happened here is wrong. We did publish our data, we just didn't do it in a journal article. In my fields, this is actually fairly typical and journals are less of the norm unless you have a big result.
The whole problem is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Sometimes when you don't have much funding and there's only a few grad. students in the lab, that evidence is no longer worth the time to collect.
See the comments below about the "neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light" paper. There is a real danger in publishing theory-breaking results when you don't have 100% confidence in them.
