"According to a study by Timothy H. Vines, et al. titled "The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age," published last week in Current Biology, most raw data from scientific papers published twenty years ago is unobtainable - either because authors have since changed their contact information and can't be reached or because the data was stored using outdated technology, like floppy disks...
Obviously, the finding is problematic. First, scientific findings are validated by their reproducibility, making access to raw data an essential way to test and retest outcomes. Vines notes that "much of the data is unique to time and place, and are thus irreplaceable, and many other data sets are expensive to regenerate." Second, as the Smithsonian points out, most of this data is funded by federal grants stipulating that all data must be available to the public, presumably for longer than a few years. And finally, the loss of data makes it impossible to do broad, decades-long studies."
No comments:
Post a Comment