Policies ensuring that research data are available on public archives are increasingly being implemented at the government [1], funding agency [2-4], 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 [8-11]. 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.
@article{vines_availability_2014,
Author = {Vines, Timothy H. and Albert, Arianne Y. K. and
Andrew, Rose L. and Débarre, Florence and Bock, Dan G.
and Franklin, Michelle T. and Gilbert, Kimberly J. and
Moore, Jean-Sébastien and Renaut, Sébastien and
Rennison, Diana J.},
Title = {The availability of research data declines rapidly
with article age},
Journal = {Current biology: CB},
Volume = {24},
Number = {1},
Pages = {94--97},
Keywords = {Biomedical Research, Databases, Factual, Internet,
Publishing, Time Factors},
abstract = {Policies ensuring that research data are available on
public archives are increasingly being implemented at
the government [1], funding agency [2-4], 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 [8-11]. 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.},
doi = {10.1016/j.cub.2013.11.014},
issn = {1879-0445},
language = {eng},
month = jan,
pmid = {24361065},
year = 2014
}
