The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age

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.

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“…2) contribute full data sets to online repositories from which other researchers can extract data for large-scale, multi-dataset studies. Recent studies have documented the importance of preserving data via publicly accessible archives (Vines et al 2013). We recommend that researchers submit data to the National Climate Data Center (NCDC, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/).…”

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“…In fact, even when data sharing is required by journal policy or society ethical standards, data access requests are frequently unfulfilled [8][9], or available data are incomplete or unusable [10]. Moreover, data and materials become less accessible over time [11]. These difficulties exist in contrast to the value of openness in general and to the move toward promoting or requiring openness by federal agencies, funders, and other stakeholders in the outcomes of scientific research [12][13][14].…”

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“…The academic community is also aware that if we do archive our data and results then we run the risk of losing this data. The study in (Vines et al, 2013) shows that the availability of data in research papers is strongly affected by the age of the article. They conclude that data cannot be reliably preserved by individual researchers.…”