Misc,
The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age
(January 2014)
Abstract
Policies ensuring that research data are available on public archives are increasingly being implemented at the government 1, funding agency 24, 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 811. 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. "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 Vines et�al. ask authors for the data underlying papers between 2 and 22 years old and find that the odds of it being reported extant decrease by 17% for every year since publication.
