On 2013 Dec 24, Hilda Bastian commented:

An important initiative. There was animated discussion (and a fair amount of cringing) when this paper was presented at the Peer Review Congress earlier this year (see this blog post). Needing to gather, adequately describe and store the data we analyze in a way that others can use it has major implications for the daily life of many researchers.

Having a spotlight shone on the adequacy of data stewardship is important, but there are some issues to keep in mind. It's in a very specific area of research. Some other fields have particular regulations about the retention, privacy and sharing of all, or some, data. See for example recent analyses of the availability of clinical trial data (Riveros C, 2013).

The numbers of papers in this study at all dwindle in earlier years: 26 in 1991 compared with 80 in 2011. Data within particular categories (such as definitely lost in any one year) are correspondingly small.

It was interesting that only 2.4% of studies had made their data available at the time of publication. (Those studies were excluded.)

The authors practice what they preach: the full data are in Dryad and there's a manuscript in arXiv.

On 2013 Dec 24, Hilda Bastian commented:

An important initiative. There was animated discussion (and a fair amount of cringing) when this paper was presented at the Peer Review Congress earlier this year (see this blog post). Needing to gather, adequately describe and store the data we analyze in a way that others can use it has major implications for the daily life of many researchers.

Having a spotlight shone on the adequacy of data stewardship is important, but there are some issues to keep in mind. It's in a very specific area of research. Some other fields have particular regulations about the retention, privacy and sharing of all, or some, data. See for example recent analyses of the availability of clinical trial data (Riveros C, 2013).

The numbers of papers in this study at all dwindle in earlier years: 26 in 1991 compared with 80 in 2011. Data within particular categories (such as definitely lost in any one year) are correspondingly small.

It was interesting that only 2.4% of studies had made their data available at the time of publication. (Those studies were excluded.)

The authors practice what they preach: the full data are in Dryad and there's a manuscript in arXiv.