Only 7 Percent

I read some sad news from a study the other day.

The short story: while many authors of research papers claim that their data is available apon request only 7% of the authors actually follow up. The study reached out to 333 open-access journals published by BioMed central which they used for a Data Availablity Study (DAS). To quote the results:

Of 3556 analyzed articles, 3416 contained the DAS. The most frequent DAS category (42%) indicated that the data sets are available on reasonable request. Among 1792 manuscripts in which the DAS indicated that authors are willing to share their data, 1669 (93%) authors either did not respond or declined to share their data with us. Among 254 (14%) of 1792 authors who responded to our query for data sharing, only 123 (6.8%) provided the requested data.

Ouch.