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

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.

Usage notes

Vines_et_al R code The R code used for the analyses CurrentBiologyData the data used in the analyses. This does not contain any identifying information for any of the manuscripts - please contact the first author for access to the raw data.