New evidence reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on December 19 confirms long-held fears about the fate of scientific data.
Careful evaluation of more than 500 randomly selected studies found that the original data behind those published papers have been lost to science at a rapid rate.
Two years after publication, data are essentially always available to other researchers who might wish to confirm the findings, the researchers found. By 20 years post-publication, 80% of that data obtained through publicly funded research is inaccessible due to mundane issues, primarily old email addresses and obsolete storage devices. The researchers call on journals to require that authors share their data on a public archive before a paper can be published.
“I think nobody expects that you’d be able to get data from a fifty-year-old paper, but to find that almost all the data sets are gone at twenty years was a bit of a surprise,” says Timothy Vines of the University of British Columbia.
“Publicly funded science generates an extraordinary amount of data each year. Much of these data are unique to a time and place, and are thus irreplaceable, and many other data sets are expensive to regenerate,” he adds. “The current system of leaving data with authors means that almost all of it is lost over time. The data are thus unavailable for future researchers to check old results or use for entirely new purposes. Losing data is a waste of research funds, and it limits how we can do science.”
Vines and his colleagues came to this conclusion by examining papers reporting a very specific and relatively simple type of data: length measurements of plants and animals. Those papers were selected because length measurements have been collected in exactly the same way for decades, making straightforward comparisons over time much easier to do.
The analysis found that the odds of obtaining an original data set for any one of those papers fell by 17% every year. In Vines’s estimation, journals are the only party with sufficient leverage to ensure that the data underlying published studies will get shared.
“Scientific data are being lost at an astonishing rate, and concerted action—particularly by journals—is needed to make sure it is saved for future researchers,” Vines says.
The Latest on: Science data lost
[google_news title=”” keyword=”Science data lost” num_posts=”10″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]
via Google News
The Latest on: Science data lost
- Neil deGrasse Tyson: What To Do About Science, Health Misinformationon May 18, 2024 at 5:08 am
Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about anti-science, how science needs to be taught in a different manner and how not enough people understand statistics and probability.
- What’s Going On With The New COVID FLiRT Variants? This Lost River Could Explain How The Pyramids Were Built, And Much More This Weekon May 18, 2024 at 1:29 am
T his week, two new searches have identified 60 potential “ alien megastructures ” in our galaxy, something strange is happening to the Y chromosome, and warm-blooded dinosaurs may have evolved 180 ...
- Lost Women of Science, a podcast with a purposeon May 17, 2024 at 11:44 am
Despite their tremendous contributions, women have been historically overshadowed in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But a podcast at ...
- We mapped a lost branch of the Nile River – which may be the key to a longstanding mystery of the pyramidson May 16, 2024 at 1:15 pm
Now obscured by areas of cultivation and urban settlements, buried by centuries of mud from the modern river, the old channels and their stories have largely been lost to time. Once a mosaic of ...
- Computer Science KS3 & 4 / GCSE: Problem Solved - Lost Dogson May 16, 2024 at 11:41 am
BBC Radio 1 presenter Dev visits an Animal Rescue Centre and asks if computational thinking can help solve the problem of lost pets. Suitable for Key Stage 4, GCSE and National 4 and National 5 ...
- Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closureson May 14, 2024 at 5:00 am
Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old ...
- Has the Term ‘Keystone Species’ Lost Its Meaning?on May 9, 2024 at 5:00 am
More than 50 years after Bob Paine’s experiment with starfish, hundreds of species have been pronounced “keystones” in their ecosystems ...
- 'Lost' spy satellite orbited Earth undetected for 25 years—until now, scientists sayon May 8, 2024 at 1:50 pm
An experimental spy satellite that was deemed "lost" after eluding detection for decades has finally been found. "The S73-7 satellite has been rediscovered after being untracked for 25 years," ...
- No one has seen the data behind Tyson’s “climate friendly beef” claimon May 8, 2024 at 7:33 am
“The industry continues to make big claims about sequestering carbon, with no science or scale to back it up ... But it does not publish the data and it says farmers can “customize their practices ...
- 'Lost' satellite finally found after orbiting undetected for 25 yearson May 6, 2024 at 11:47 am
The Infra-Red Calibration Balloon (S73-7) satellite had gone off the grid from radar not once but twice — once in the 1970s and then again in the 1990s. After 25 years missing in orbit, it has finally ...
via Bing News