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Data from: The availability of research data declines rapidly with article age
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Vines, Timothy H.; Albert, Arianne Y. K.; Andrew, Rose L.; Débarre, Florence; Bock, Dan G.; Franklin, Michelle T.; Gilbert, Kimberly J.; Moore, Jean-Sébastien; Renaut, Sébastien; Rennison, Diana J. — 2014-11-05 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 datasets 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 dataset being extant fell by 17% per year. In addition, the odds that we could find a working email 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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Data from: Mandated data archiving greatly improves access to research data
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Vines, Timothy H.; Andrew, Rose L.; Bock, Dan G.; Franklin, Michelle T.; Gilbert, Kimberly J.; Kane, Nolan C.; Moore, Jean-Sébastien; Moyers, Brook T.; Renaut, Sébastien; Rennison, Diana J.; Veen, Thor; Yeaman, Sam — 2013-01-04 The data underlying scientific papers should be accessible to researchers both now and in the future, but how best can we ensure that these data are available? Here we examine the effectiveness of four approaches to data archiving: no stated archiving policy, recommending (but not requiring) archiving, and two versions of mandating data deposition at acceptance. We control for differences between data types by trying to obtain data from papers that use a single, widespread population genetic analysis, STRUCTURE. At one extreme, we found that mandated data archiving policies that require the inclusion of a data availability statement in the manuscript improve the odds of finding the data online almost 1000-fold compared to having no policy. However, archiving rates at journals with less stringent policies were only very slightly higher than those with no policy at all. We also assessed the effectiveness of asking for data directly from authors and obtained over half of the requested datasets, albeit with ∼8 d delay and some disagreement with authors. Given the long-term benefits of data accessibility to the academic community, we believe that journal-based mandatory data archiving policies and mandatory data availability statements should be more widely adopted.

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(Author: Franklin, Michelle T.)

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