Data from: The availability of research data declines rapidly with article age

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.要求研究数据可在公共存档库中获取的政策，目前正愈发广泛地在政府、资助机构以及学术期刊三个层面推行。这些政策的立论基础在于：研究人员作为自身研究数据的保管者往往并不称职，尤其在长期维度下；事实上诸多已有研究均证实，作者通常无法或不愿共享其研究数据。然而目前尚无针对研究数据可获取性随发表后时长变化情况的系统性评估。为此，我们向发表于2至22年前的516篇相对同质的学术论文的作者发起数据集索要请求，结果发现数据可获取性受论文发表时长的影响极为显著。在作者披露了自身数据状态的论文样本中，数据集仍可获取的几率每年降低17%。此外，我们能够联系到第一作者、末位作者或通讯作者的有效电子邮箱地址的几率，每年下降7%。本研究结果进一步佐证了如下观点：从长期来看，个体研究人员无法可靠留存研究数据；同时也凸显了出台强制要求通过公共存档库共享数据的政策的紧迫性。