Fig 1.
How complete and reusable are publicly archived data in ecology and evolution?
The expectation of PDA that exists in genetics and molecular biology is rapidly permeating throughout ecology and evolution. With the advent of data archiving policies and integrated data repositories, journals and funders now have effective means of mandating PDA. However, the quality of publicly archived data associated with experimental and observational (nonmolecular) studies in ecology and evolution is highly variable. Illustration by Ainsley Seago.
Table 1.
Journal and publication year of 100 reviewed studies with associated data publicly archived in the digital repository Dryad (http://datadryad.org/).
At the time of data deposition in the repository, journals had either a “strong” PDA policy or adhered to the Joint Data Archiving Policy (JDAP), both of which require that data necessary to replicate a study’s results be archived in a public repository. Datasets were examined to assess completeness and reusability.
Table 2.
Data completeness and reusability assessment.
Scoring system and criteria used to assess data completeness and reusability of 100 studies with data archived in the public repository Dryad.
Fig 2.
Completeness and reusability scores.
Frequency distribution of public data archiving (PDA) scores for (A) completeness and (B) reusability across 100 studies in 2012 (light blue bars) and 2013 (dark blue bars). A score of 5 indicates exemplary archiving, and a score of 1 indicates poor archiving (see Table 2). Studies with completeness scores of 3 or lower (left of the red dashed line in panel A) do not comply with their journal's PDA policy. Studies to the left of the red dashed line in panel B have a reusability score between “average” (score of 3) and very poor (score of 1).
Fig 3.
The relationship between the reusability and completeness of archived datasets (R = 0.59, p < 0.001).
Empty circles are individual data points (offset to avoid overlap).
Table 3.
Key recommendations to improve PDA practices.
References listed provide specific details and more extensive discussion on these topics.