Title: Long term availability of raw experimental data in experimental fracture mechanics,
Abstract: Experimental data availability is a cornerstone for reproducibility in
experimental fracture mechanics, which is crucial to the scientific method.
This short communication focuses on the accessibility and long term
availability of raw experimental data. The corresponding authors of the eleven
most cited papers, related to experimental fracture mechanics, for every year
from 2000 up to 2016, were kindly asked about the availability of the raw
experimental data associated with each publication. For the 187 e-mails sent:
22.46% resulted in outdated contact information, 57.75% of the authors did
received our request and did not reply, and 19.79 replied to our request. The
availability of data is generally low with only $11$ available data sets
(5.9%). The authors identified two main issues for the lacking availability of
raw experimental data. First, the ability to retrieve data is strongly attached
to the the possibility to contact the corresponding author. This study suggests
that institutional e-mail addresses are insufficient means for obtaining
experimental data sets. Second, lack of experimental data is also due that
submission and publication does not require to make the raw experimental data
available. The following solutions are proposed: (1) Requirement of unique
identifiers, like ORCID or ResearcherID, to detach the author(s) from their
institutional e-mail address, (2) Provide DOIs, like Zenodo or Dataverse, to
make raw experimental data citable, and (3) grant providing organizations
should ensure that experimental data by public funded projects is available to
the public.