The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age: eighty percent of scientific data are lost within two decades (2014-01-10)

Old email addresses and obsolete storage devices are to blame for the loss of 80 percent of scientific data within two decades. "Publicly funded science generates an extraordinary amount of data each year,” said Tim Vines, a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia.

 

 

Researchers 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.

Once the results of a study are published, the data on which those results are based are often stored unreliably, subject to loss by hard drive failure and (even more likely) by the researcher forgetting the specific details required to use the data.
Moreover, most data are never available to the broader community, even after publication of the results; in most cases this unavailability becomes permanent following the eventual death of the researchers involved. In ecology and evolutionary biology, we are losing nearly all of this important legacy.

Data often can be used in ways beyond the questions that sparked their collection; for example, many studies contain information that can serve later as a baseline for detecting population trends, even decades later: papers that have had data archived are more useful to—and more cited by—other scientists. One study found that papers that archived their data were cited 69% more often than papers that did not.

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.

Researchers 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.

In the long term, research data cannot be reliably preserved by individual researchers without policies mandating data sharing via public archives.

For more information
Currebt Biology
The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age

Data Archiving

MDN