Inaccessible data sharing: Link rot in the Data Availability Statement

Data Availability Statement, an account within research articles about whether the data underlying the research is shared and if so, how it can be accessed, has been increasingly embraced by academic communities as a venue to share research data. The Public Library of Science (PLOS) is one of the first major publishers to implement this policy from the beginning of 2014 and reported that 20% of statements linking to external websites in 2016. However, does this policy greatly improve the availability of research data? Few studies have examined the effectiveness of these statements in data sharing. In this study, we examined to what extent the shared data can be accessed from the links specified in the statements. 39,444 URLs from all PLOS ONE publications between 2014 and 2020 were extracted. In this poster, we present preliminary findings on the types of URLs specified in the statements and their access rates. Our study aims to draw attention from data publishers and researchers on the issues of inaccessible data sharing and highlight the inconsistent practices of linking certain data repositories in the data availability statements. Finally, we propose three recommendations for those dedicated to data sharing and publishing to improve their data policy so as to promote the availability of datasets. The implications of our findings and the next step of the study are also discussed in this presentation.