Data from: Mandated data archiving greatly improves access to research data

At one extreme, we found that mandated data archiving policies that require the inclusion of a data availability statement in the manuscript improve the odds of finding the data online almost 1000-fold compared to having no policy. However, archiving rates at journals with less stringent policies were only very slightly higher than those with no policy at all. We also assessed the effectiveness of asking for data directly from authors and obtained over half of the requested datasets, albeit with ∼8 d delay and some disagreement with authors.

Given the long-term benefits of data accessibility to the academic community, we believe that journal-based mandatory data archiving policies and mandatory data availability statements should be more widely adopted.

Usage notes

Journal policies A file giving the data archiving policies from the journals covered in the study. Data request protocol The sequence of emails used to request data from authors. Vines_et_al_Rcode_4th_Jan The R code used in the statistical analyses Vinesetal_data_4th Jan The data used in the statistical analyses