(September 29th, 2009) Sharing experimental raw data with colleagues obviously doesn’t come as easy as it should do. In a recent small study only one out of ten requests led to success, although the authors had had to promise to share their data in order to get the respective papers published. Ralf Neumann reports.
Apparently, researchers are much more reluctant to share data with their colleagues than they actually should. At least the authors of a small study, just published in PLoS ONE, directly experienced that in only one of ten cases the requested raw data material was indeed provided to them.
In the study, Caroline Savage and Andrew Vickers from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York had approached the authors of ten papers published in PLoS Medicine and PLoS Clinical Trials requesting the raw data on which the articles were based. What thereupon actually happened (or didn’t happen), as summarised by the authors, was that “[…] three investigators did not respond, four authors responded and refused to share their data, two email addresses were no longer valid, and one author requested further details. A reminder of PLoS’s explicit requirement that authors share data did not change the reply from the four authors who initially refused. Only one author sent an original data set”.
Of course, as the majority of other journals, the PLoS journals have also adopted strict guidelines concerning data sharing as a requirement for publication. In the “PLoS Medicine Editorial and Publishing Policies”, for example, it states that “Open access applies to both the scientific literature and the data used to establish that literature. Publication is contingent on making data integral to a manuscript freely available without restriction, provided that appropriate attribution is given and that suitable mechanisms exist for sharing the data used in a manuscript and that in the case of clinical information patient confidentiality is not compromised. […] Note that any restrictions on the availability or on the use of datasets might be judged to diminish the significance of a paper and will therefore influence the decision about whether a paper should be published”.
And it’s not only the journals. In the meantime, many funding agencies have also established guidelines for data sharing. Forerunner was the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which in 2003, already declared, “In NIH’s view, all data should be considered for data sharing. Data should be made as widely and freely available as possible while safeguarding the privacy of participants, and protecting confidential and proprietary data. To facilitate data sharing, investigators submitting a research application requesting $500,000 or more of direct costs in any single year to NIH on or after October 1, 2003 are expected to include a plan for sharing final research data for research purposes, or state why data sharing is not possible.”
Have all these guidelines been virtually ineffective, so far? Although the study of Savage and Vickers might be too small to infer general conclusions about the willingness of researchers to share their raw data, its results have already raised alarms. Ginny Barbour, Chief Editor for PLoS Medicine, wrote in the PLoS Medicine community blog ‘Speaking of Medicine’, “We would hope that the investigators’ conclusion that ‘our findings suggest that explicit journal policies requiring data sharing do not lead to authors making their data sets available to independent investigators’, would not prove to be generally true. However, even if these authors are not representative more generally of PLoS authors, the findings remain troubling.”
In any case, it would be good to see a broader study of the topic, including some more solid and definite statistics. Also, it would be helpful to see some correlations, such as time since publication, discipline, age differences, open access versus classical journals, etc. …
The most interesting aspect for the moment, however, might be how PLoS actually responds. The authors of nine of the ten papers clearly violated PLoS’s policy on data sharing. If taking their own rules seriously, theoretically, the PLoS people would have to publicly pull the papers from the journals. Otherwise, their policies requiring data sharing would effectively be meaningless.
Apparently, such a case has not yet arisen, however, there’s a first time for everything. Perhaps, PLOS should seize this opportunity to set a deterrent example. It seems necessary.
(Photo: iStockphoto / Jose Manuel Gelpi Diaz)