The paper, based on a study conducted by researchers at Drexel, Brandeis, and Harvard Universities, represents an attempt to measure the effectiveness of policies instituted by funding agencies and journals to encourage the wider sharing of data by scientists.
The study consisted of a survey that was sent to 2,853 life-sciences investigators at leading research institutions and that drew a response rate of 41 percent. The answers were compared with those in a similarly designed survey by a separate research team in 2000. The comparison was chosen because of various changes in rules and the creation of data repositories since 2000, including a 2003 requirement by the National Institutes of Health for the inclusion of data-sharing plans in all grant applications with an expected annual value exceeding $500,000.