Key Findings
The audit concludes that repository identity explains 37.9% of the variance in reuse scores, an effect an order of magnitude greater than the variance caused by sub-domain, publication year, or sustainability framing. A four-tier quality structure emerged: Dryad, Zenodo, and Figshare occupy the high tier (median scores $\ge$ 5); 4TU.ResearchData, Fordatis, and Mendeley Data are in the middle; Harvard Dataverse follows with a median of three; and OSF collapses to a median of one. The most significant contrast exists between OSF and Dryad, where a randomly selected Dryad record outranks an OSF record in 98.2% of pairings.
Technical Details
The study harvested 53,038 records from eight generalist repositories using 74 polymer- and sustainability-related keywords. Each record was evaluated against 11 binary FAIR-aligned criteria. Results show a structural discontinuity in metadata completeness:
- High Completion (Bibliographic): DOI (93.2%), rich abstract (87.4%), keywords (86.1%), and licenses (82.9%).
- Low Completion (Reuse Value): Measurement-method description (41.3%), synthesis-method description (32.2%), listed variables (21.5%), open-format files (10.3%), identifiable units (8.3%), READMEs (4.3%), and code links (1.2%).
Background and Context
Polymer informatics and machine-learning models increasingly rely on aggregated open datasets. However, polymer researchers lack domain-specific deposition sites; platforms like Polymer Genome, PI1M, and OpenPoly are read-only, while NOMAD and the Materials Project contain less than 0.1% polymer-relevant content. Consequently, researchers use generalist repositories, but the quality of these deposits has not kept pace with volume. Annual deposits rose from 5,905 in 2020 to 14,374 in 2025, yet the mean reuse score only increased from 3.84 to 4.14.
Significance and Outlook
The open polymer-data ecosystem is widening without deepening. The nineteen-fold gap between volume growth and quality growth indicates that the signal-to-noise ratio is not improving. For downstream researchers, the ability to find, understand, and re-execute datasets remains bounded by the specific repository chosen by the original depositor.
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