A seminal publication in 2009 by Chalmers and Glasziou 1 identified unusable research reports as a primary contributor to avoidable waste in research production.
The broader issue of waste in research, first introduced by Chalmers and Glasziou, 31 has recently been explored in a series of articles including among others waste due to inaccessible research, 32 and waste due to incomplete or unusable research reports.
Even data stored in an easily-accessible structured format may be unreliable or unusable for research, due to its initial intended purpose, for example billing [ 43].
She also ran into a hurdle when she found that all of those old tapes of Vreeland and Plimpton were unusable except for research purposes, the sound being simply too low-quality to work effectively on screen.
The plaintiffs, David Warmsley of Middletown, an eighth-generation direct descendant of Venture Smith, and Douglas Jones of Essex, a local historian and lecturer, said the waste site would destroy a significant historical landmark and make it inaccessible and unusable for archaeological research.
Another article in the series tackles incomplete or unusable reports of biomedical research, noting that in 241 functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, fewer than two-thirds reported the number of examinations and their duration; the resolution, coverage, and slice order of images appeared in fewer than half.
"Novelty increases people's tolerance for unusable things," says Dave Yeats, a senior research scientist at Perceptive.
The resources needed will be substantial but small compared with the $100bn£62bnbn; €76bn) spent on medical research annually, much of which is wasted because it is unusable or unused.
3 The omission of essential information about interventions is a substantial, yet remediable, contributor to the enormous worldwide waste in research funding that occurs because research is unpublished or unusable.
This raises an interesting question: if policymakers routinely resolve to make decisions largely based on academic research, and given that relevant academic research often does not exist or is unusable in its current format, could that actually be counter-productive?
But others have voiced a range of fears, including that not enough usable lines exist, that the owners of such lines will impose unreasonable conditions on research, and that the existing lines' possible contamination with animal viruses would make them unusable for clinical research.
