Conditional dataset survival decays ~17% per year after publication

Vines 2014 (S-0001) found that, conditional on authors responding with the status of their data, the odds of a dataset still existing fell by approximately 17% per year after publication.

The conditioning matters. The 17% figure is the per-year decline in survival probability among datasets the original author was still able to comment on at all. Datasets associated with authors who could not be located, had moved institutions, had retired, or had died are not in this conditional measure — they are upstream of it, and their non-delivery rates are higher.

The 17%-per-year decay is the time dimension of the C-0002 baseline. Static cross-sectional measurements (E-0001 through E-0004) report the steady-state non-delivery rate; the decay rate explains why the steady state is what it is. Each year after publication, the storage substrate loses a fraction of the datasets it nominally holds. The aggregate measurement at any time captures the cumulative consequence of that decay across the cohort's age distribution.

The architectural implication: a regime in which preservation does not survive the operational lifetime of an individual researcher produces this exact decay rate. A regime in which preservation survives independently of any individual's continued participation produces a fundamentally different time profile. The decay rate is what each architecture tier produces.