Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2018 Jul 6;13(7):e0199789.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0199789. eCollection 2018.

A funder-imposed data publication requirement seldom inspired data sharing

Jessica L Couture  1   2 , Rachael E Blake  2   3 , Gavin McDonald  1   4 , Colette L Ward  2   5
Affiliations

A funder-imposed data publication requirement seldom inspired data sharing

Jessica L Couture et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Growth of the open science movement has drawn significant attention to data sharing and availability across the scientific community. In this study, we tested the ability to recover data collected under a particular funder-imposed requirement of public availability. We assessed overall data recovery success, tested whether characteristics of the data or data creator were indicators of recovery success, and identified hurdles to data recovery. Overall the majority of data were not recovered (26% recovery of 315 data projects), a similar result to journal-driven efforts to recover data. Field of research was the most important indicator of recovery success, but neither home agency sector nor age of data were determinants of recovery. While we did not find a relationship between recovery of data and age of data, age did predict whether we could find contact information for the grantee. The main hurdles to data recovery included those associated with communication with the researcher; loss of contact with the data creator accounted for half (50%) of unrecoverable datasets, and unavailability of contact information accounted for 35% of unrecoverable datasets. Overall, our results suggest that funding agencies and journals face similar challenges to enforcement of data requirements. We advocate that funding agencies could improve the availability of the data they fund by dedicating more resources to enforcing compliance with data requirements, providing data-sharing tools and technical support to awardees, and administering stricter consequences for those who ignore data sharing preconditions.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Final status of all data projects.
Black bars are projects for which data were successfully acquired, grey bars represent projects for which no data were acquired.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Data recovery grouped by research field.
Total successful (black) and unsuccessful (grey) data requests by research field. Asterisks indicate significant research fields.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Reasons given for not providing data.
Communication loss and lack of contact information were the main reasons data were not obtained.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Mascarelli Amanda Leigh. Data’s shameful neglect. Nature. 2009;461: 145. - PubMed
    1. Gewin V. Turning point: Carl Boettiger. Nature. 2013;493: 711–711.
    1. Obama B. Executive order–making open and machine readable the new default for government information. White House. 2013;
    1. Hampton SE, Anderson SS, Bagby SC, Gries C, Han X, Hart EM, et al. The Tao of open science for ecology. Ecosphere. 2015;6: art120 doi: 10.1890/ES14-00402.1 - DOI
    1. Griffin Elizabeth. Rescue old data before its too late. Nature. 18 May 2017. 545: 267 doi: 10.1038/545267a - DOI - PubMed

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources