Authors
- Highlights
- We examined the availability of data from 516 studies between 2 and 22 years old
- The odds of a data set being reported as extant fell by 17% per year
- Broken e-mails and obsolete storage devices were the main obstacles to data sharing
- Policies mandating data archiving at publication are clearly needed
Summary
Policies ensuring that research data are available on public archives are increasingly being implemented at the government [
1], funding agency [
2,
3,
4], and journal [
5,
6]
level. These policies are predicated on the idea that authors are poor
stewards of their data, particularly over the long term [
7], and indeed many studies have found that authors are often unable or unwilling to share their data [
8,
9,
10,
11].
However, there are no systematic estimates of how the availability of
research data changes with time since publication. We therefore
requested data sets from a relatively homogenous set of 516 articles
published between 2 and 22 years ago, and found that availability of the
data was strongly affected by article age. For papers where the authors
gave the status of their data, the odds of a data set being extant fell
by 17% per year. In addition, the odds that we could find a working
e-mail address for the first, last, or corresponding author fell by 7%
per year. Our results reinforce the notion that, in the long term,
research data cannot be reliably preserved by individual researchers,
and further demonstrate the urgent need for policies mandating data
sharing via public archives.
source
, Arianne Y.K. Albert, Rose L. Andrew, Florence Débarre, Dan G. Bock, Michelle T. Franklin, Kimberly J. Gilbert, Jean-Sébastien Moore, Sébastien Renaut, Diana J. Rennison