Early results: public data archiving increases scientific contribution by more than a third

"To date, most arguments about the value of data reuse have been based upon assumption or promise rather than evidence....Here’s what I [Heather Piwowar] have found so far. THESE ARE PRELIMINARY RESULTS....There were 2711 submissions to GEO [NCBI’s Gene Expression Omnibus] in 2007. In the three years since these datasets were deposited, the original investigators (or people with the same last names as the original investigators) have published 851 papers in PubMed Central in which they refer to their dataset accession numbers. Extrapolating that based on the ratios of papers in PMC to PubMed in this domain (2007:23%, 2008:32%, 2009:36%, 2010:25%), I estimate there are at least 3249 papers in PubMed, by the original investigators, that use or reuse 2007 GEO data. In the same three years, author groups that did not include anyone from the original dataset submission group published 323 papers in PubMed Central referring to GEO data accession numbers from 2007. This extrapolates to 1109 secondary-use papers in all of PubMed that pay attribution to the 2007 GEO datasets through accession numbers.... This implies that within three years, GEO has enabled the science contribution behind its dataset submissions to contribute to one third more scientific publications than would have been possible had the data not been publicly archived. Furthermore, the number of these reuses is still increasing over time, unlike those of the original investigators...."