“Inconsistent” enforcement of data sharing rules by journals is making it impossible for researchers to interrogate published scientific findings, researchers have claimed.
Highlighting the “weak” policing of mandates requiring authors to share raw data from their studies, a paper by academics in Canada and Sweden claims the lack of publicly available results has led to a “transparency crisis in research” that limits the reliability of published findings.
In the paper published in PLOS Medicine, its authors argue that, “despite wide-spread data-sharing policies, compliance remains low, enforcement weak, and monitoring almost non-existent” at most journals, “with many datasets remaining unavailable or inaccessible”.
Referring to a 2023 Science study analysing 7,750 biomedical papers between 2015 and 2020, only 9 per cent of papers pledged to make all their data publicly available and only 3 per cent followed through with this commitment.
Noting how the existence of a data availability statement often made little difference to whether authors shared their results or not, the paper also cites a 2022 study which found only 7 per cent of authors behind papers pledging to share their data on request actually did so when they were approached.
