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数据存档平台获取的政策，正日益在政府、资助机构及学术期刊层面得到推行。此类政策的立论基础在于：研究者并非合格的数据保管者，从长期维度而言尤为如此；且已有大量研究证实，作者往往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516篇发表于2至22年前的同质化研究文章的作者索要数据集，结果发现数据可获取性受文章发表时长的显著影响：在作者明确提供了数据状态的论文中，数据集仍可获取的概率每年下降17%。此外，我们能够获取第一作者、最后一位作者或通讯作者有效邮箱地址的概率，每年也会降低7%。本研究结果进一步佐证了如下观点：从长期来看，个体研究者无法可靠留存研究数据；同时也凸显了强制要求通过公共数据存档平台共享数据的政策的紧迫性。