2024-05-24: Paper Summary: Disappearing repositories – taking an infrastructure perspective on the long-term availability of research data
Figure 1: usgs.gov/products/data-and-tools , one of the 191 repositories in Re3data that is now defunct With more and more scholarly papers being published, researchers are increasingly citing datasets. Therefore, preserving datasets for the long term is important as these datasets need to continue to be accessible after citation and are crucial for reproducibility. However, there is a significant problem with preserving research data over time because research data repositories can suddenly shut down unexpectedly. Attwood et al. ( 2015) showed 75% of biological databases were either closed entirely or outdated within 18 years . In the paper " Disappearing repositories – taking an infrastructure perspective on the long-term availability of research data ", published in PLOS Biology in 2024, Strecker et al. take a broad look at data preservation by examining closed repositories. The authors investigated 191 closed research data repositories out ...