Data Are Lost To Science At 'astonishing Rate.'

[Oxytropidoceras]

From personal experience, I do not need a

scientific study to know that it is a real and

frustrating problem in geology and paleontology.

Data are lost to science at 'astonishing

rate.' EurekAlert, December 19, 2013

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-12/cp-dal121213.php

Where Have All the Data Gone? (Twenty years

after publication in 1991, 80 percent of the

data behind scientific papers was no longer

available. Karen Hopkin reports)

Scientific American, December 19, 2013

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=where-have-all-the-data-gone-13-12-19

The paper is:

Vines, T. H., A. Y. K. Albert, and others,

2014, The Availability of Research Data

Declines Rapidly with Article Age. Current

Biology. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.11.014

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S0960982213014000

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2813%2901400-0

Yours,

Paul H.

[ActionJ]

This is so true! I wanted to back track for a paper on mammal body masses and I even ended up going back to the author's thesis only to find he did not include it there. Now the author is deceased and I'm not even sure how anyone would go back to replicate his work.. Always include your data in your publications. There are so many options for repositories... no excuse these days.

[Scylla]

Data degrades. I have seen huge stockpiles of data collecting dust in storage and when the researcher that collected it dies or retires, it becomes worthless since no one knows what it represents. One interesting example was a large cage of polygraph paper rolls from the 60's or 70's that was stored in the men's room at a research facility I worked at. I doubt anyone there has a key to the cage anymore, let alone knows what those rolls represent. So the silverfish get to keep eating. Any data stored on a computer 20 or 30 years ago is likely to be in difficult to read formats. Sometimes I think science is a living thing, cut funding, shut labs and that part dies. The knowledge we think we can re-create will be gone and we'll have to start over.