The availability of research data declines rapidly with article age

By Timothy H. Vines, Arianne Y. Albert, R. Andrew, F. Debarre, Dan G. Bock, Michelle T. Franklin, K. Gilbert, Jean-Sébastien Moore, S. Renaut, D. Rennison. Current Biology, 2013

451 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Information Systems, Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/314036b0b7585a65a1c9241414114f2413fd6720

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Citations in the corpus

ITK: enabling reproducible research and open science (2014, unknown): “Data and documentation are also required (Carp, 2012; Vines et al., 2013; Glasziou et al., 2014).”
Cytobank: providing an analytics platform for community cytometry data analysis and collaboration. (2014, background): “Sustainability of preserving collected and annotated data is a key part of scientiﬁc research—currently, the availability of general research data declines rapidly as time progresses (Vines et al. 2014).”
Same data, different conclusions: Radical dispersion in empirical results when independent analysts operationalize and test the same hypothesis (2021, background): “This question generally goes unanswered, as most datasets from published articles are not available to peers (Aguinis & Solarino, in press; Alsheikh-Ali, Qureshi, Al-Mallah, & Ioannidis, 2011; Savage & Vickers, 2009; Vines et al., 2013; Wicherts, Borsboom, Kats, & Molenaar, 2006; Womack, 2015; Young”
Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices: A Simple, Low-Cost, Effective Method for Increasing Transparency (2016, methodology): “Moreover, simple specifications of what is required to earn a badge is effective in promoting use of independent repositories that have stronger assurance of availability and preservation than ad hoc methods such as posting data on personal websites [11].”
The natural selection of bad science (2016, background): “90% of replications in psychology target work less than 10 years old [14]) and because decreased data availability for older papers makes replication more difficult [74], we restrict the size of the literature available for replication to the 1 million most recently published results.”
Effective monitoring of freshwater fish (2019, background): “For example, Vines et al. (2014) estimated that the availability of research data declines with article age, with the probability of finding the dataset decreasing by 17% per year.”
An open investigation of the reproducibility of cancer biology research (2014, unknown): “Finally, reproducing analyses with prior data is difficult because researchers are often reluctant to share data, even when required by funding bodies or scientific societies et al., 2014 ).”