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Research Article

The Dataset Is Available Upon Request (The Request Will Not Be Fulfilled)

Dr. Null Hypothesis
I3E TRPII· Volume 1 , Issue 1 · Pages 1-11 ·
DOI: 10.I3E/trpii.2026.00045 Link copied!
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Editor's Summary

The editors requested the data underlying this paper. The authors responded that it is available upon reasonable request. The editors consider this appropriate for a paper published in I3E TRPII.

Abstract

The phrase “data available upon reasonable request” has become a standard assurance in scientific publications, appearing in 34% of papers in our target journals. We systematically tested this assurance by submitting data requests to the corresponding authors of 400 such papers. We received a response of any kind from 38% of authors; functional, usable data from 3.5%; and a response that could be characterized as hostile from 7.2%. The remaining 62% did not respond. We conclude that “available upon reasonable request” functions as a rhetorical device rather than a data access policy, and recommend that journals require a different phrase, such as “not available.”

Article

Introduction

Data sharing norms in science have shifted substantially in the past decade. Journals, funders, and institutions increasingly require researchers to either deposit data in public repositories or commit to sharing it upon request. The public repository requirement is honored with some consistency. The “upon request” alternative is the subject of this paper.

The mechanics of “upon request” data availability are as follows: a researcher submits a paper asserting that data is available upon reasonable request; the journal accepts this assertion without verification; the paper is published; a reader who wishes to replicate the work sends an email to the corresponding author; and then something happens. We investigated what that something is.

Methodology

We identified 400 papers published between 2022 and 2025 in journals with mandatory data availability statements, each containing the phrase “available upon reasonable request” or a close variant. Corresponding authors were identified from the published paper. We sent a standardized data request email within 6 months of publication, identifying ourselves as researchers attempting replication and specifying the exact dataset required.

We sent one follow-up email two weeks after the initial request if no response was received. We did not send additional follow-ups, as a pilot study indicated that third requests produced a response quality we coded as “confrontational” at higher rates than the data would justify.

Results

Of 400 requests, 152 (38%) received any response within 90 days. Responses were coded into seven categories. The largest category (29.4% of responses) was “data is being prepared and will be sent shortly,” followed by email with no attachment, from which we infer that data preparation is a process that takes longer than the study period. The second largest category (24.3%) was a link to a GitHub repository containing only the code and a README stating that data is available upon reasonable request.

Fourteen requests (3.5%) produced functional, usable datasets that allowed us to attempt replication. Of these fourteen, seven produced results consistent with the original paper within a margin we considered acceptable, three produced results that differed from the published results in ways the original authors declined to explain, and four produced results identical to the published results in ways that would only be possible if we were running the original code on the original data rather than an independent replication, which we were not. We have not resolved this last finding.

The “Reasonable” Question

Our data requests identified ourselves as researchers conducting academic replication. We were therefore, by any definition, reasonable requestors. In 29 cases, authors responded that our request did not meet their threshold for reasonableness. We requested clarification on what threshold would be met in 15 of these cases. We received clarification in 0 of them.

References

  1. Available, D. (2024). “Upon Request.” Journal of Unverified Commitments, 1(1), pp. 1-1.
  2. Wilkinson, M., et al. (2016). “The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management.” Scientific Data, 3, 160018. (Real paper. Situation ongoing.)
  3. GitHub, G. (2023). “Code Is Not Data: A Reminder Nobody Asked For.” Replication Quarterly, 7(2), pp. 33-40.
  4. Hypothesis, N. (2026). “The Data for This Paper Is Available Upon Request.” I3E Trashactions on Reproducibility Problems in Imaginary Institutions, 1(1), pp. 12-12.

Author Affiliations

1. Replication Crisis Documentation Unit, Institute for Phantom Data

References

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