The network and its archive are not in dispute, but three analytic decisions are made by people with access to the data: which events count as globally attended, where each analysis window begins and ends, and which statistic to compute. The central criticism is that this freedom is sufficient to generate the reported result from structureless data, and it cannot be tested from the published analyses alone.
What would resolve this An outside party defining a list of events and window boundaries in advance, lodging it, and the project running the analysis once against that list without modification.
OpenStatistics; pre-registration methodologyRoger D. Nelson (Global Consciousness Project), The Global Consciousness Project