Public Data Archiving in Ecology and Evolution: How Well Are We Doing?

Policies that mandate public data archiving (PDA) successfully increase accessibility to data underlying scientific publications. However, is the data quality sufficient to allow reuse and reanalysis? We surveyed 100 datasets associated with nonmolecular studies in journals that commonly publish ecological and evolutionary research and have a strong PDA policy. Out of these datasets, 56% were incomplete, and 64% were archived in a way that partially or entirely prevented reuse. We suggest that cultural shifts facilitating clearer benefits to authors are necessary to achieve high-quality PDA and highlight key guidelines to help authors increase their data’s reuse potential and compliance with journal data policies.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  PLoS Biology

• Publication date

  2015-11-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002295PMID 26556502PMCID 4640582
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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