Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America.
National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Jul 6;13(7):e0199789. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0199789. eCollection 2018.
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.
开放科学运动的发展引起了科学界对数据共享和可用性的极大关注。在这项研究中，我们测试了根据特定资助者规定的公共可用性要求来恢复数据的能力。我们评估了总体数据恢复成功率，测试了数据或数据创建者的特征是否是恢复成功的指标，并确定了数据恢复的障碍。总体而言，大多数数据都未被恢复（315 个数据项目中有 26%被恢复），这与期刊驱动的恢复数据的努力结果相似。研究领域是恢复成功的最重要指标，但数据创建者的机构部门和年龄都不是恢复的决定因素。虽然我们没有发现数据恢复与数据年龄之间存在关系，但年龄确实可以预测我们是否可以找到受赠人的联系信息。数据恢复的主要障碍包括与研究人员沟通相关的障碍；与数据创建者失去联系占不可恢复数据集的一半（50%），而无法获取联系信息占不可恢复数据集的 35%。总体而言，我们的结果表明，资助机构和期刊在执行数据要求方面面临着类似的挑战。我们主张，资助机构可以通过投入更多资源来执行数据要求的合规性、为获奖者提供数据共享工具和技术支持，以及对那些忽视数据共享前提条件的人实施更严格的后果，来提高他们资助的数据的可用性。
