Tag Archives: data sharing

Data and methods available? Forget it!

Bergeat 2022

Data were available for 2 of 65 RCTs (3.1%) published before the ICMJE policy and for 2 of 65 RCTs (3.1%) published after the policy was issued (odds ratio, 1.00; 95% CI, 0.07-14.19; P > .99).

Danchev 2021

Among the 89 articles declaring that IPD would be stored in repositories, only 17 (19.1%) deposited data, mostly because of embargo and regulatory approval.

Gabelica 2022 (visualization @ Nature)

Of 3556 analyzed articles, 3416 contained DAS. The most frequent DAS category (42%) indicated that the datasets are available on reasonable request. Among 1792 manuscripts in which DAS indicated that authors are willing to share their data, 1670 (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 122 (6.8%) provided the requested data.

The same issue applies also to software sharing  where less than 5% of all papers is depositing code. And whenever they deposit software, it is even not running anymore a few years later as operating systems and libraries changed.

Both issues took me many years of my scientific life. It is recognized by politics in Germany but also the most recent action plan looks  … ridiculous. Why not making data and software sharing mandatory at time of publication?

Biotorrents

A great idea – published now at PLoS ONE today and live at www.biotorrents.net– is a significant step ahead.

The transfer of scientific data has emerged as a significant challenge, as datasets continue to grow in size and demand as open access sharing increases. Current methods for file transfer do not scale well for large files and can cause long transfer times. In this study, we present BioTorrents, a website that allows open access sharing of scientific data and uses the popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing technology. BioTorrents allows files to be transferred rapidly due to the sharing of bandwidth across multiple institutions and provides more reliable file transfers due to the built-in error checking of the file sharing technology.

Just install a BitTorrent client, read the basics at Wikipedia, and convince your computing department Continue reading Biotorrents