The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age

Title
The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age
Publication Date
2014
Author(s)
Vines, Timothy H
Albert, Arianne Y K
Andrew, Rose
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0099-8336
Email: randre20@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:randre20
Debarre, Florence
Bock, Dan G
Franklin, Michelle T
Gilbert, Kimberly J
Moore, Jean-Sebastien
Renaut, Sebastien
Rennison, Diana J
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Cell Press
Place of publication
United States of America
DOI
10.1016/j.cub.2013.11.014
UNE publication id
une:15874
Abstract
Policies ensuring that research data are available on public archives are increasingly being implemented at the government, funding agency, and journal level. These policies are predicated on the idea that authors are poor stewards of their data, particularly over the long term, and indeed many studies have found that authors are often unable or unwilling to share their data. 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.
Link
Citation
Current Biology, 24(1), p. 94-97
ISSN
1879-0445
0960-9822
Start page
94
End page
97

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