  Mining Software Repositories (MSR) is an applied and practise-oriented field
aimed at solving real problems encountered by practitioners and bringing value
to Industry. Replication of results and findings, generalizability and external
validity, University-Industry collaboration, data sharing and creation dataset
repositories are important issues in MSR research. Research consisting of
bibliometric analysis of MSR paper shows lack of University-Industry
collaboration, deficiency of studies on closed or propriety source dataset and
lack of data as well as tool sharing by researchers. We conduct a survey of
authors of past three years of MSR conference (2012, 2013 and 2014) to collect
data on their views and suggestions to address the stated concerns. We asked 20
questions from more than 100 authors and received a response from 39 authors.
Our results shows that about one-third of the respondents always make their
dataset publicly available and about one-third believe that data sharing should
be a mandatory condition for publication in MSR conferences. Our survey reveals
that more than 50% authors used solely open-source software (OSS) dataset for
their research. More than 50% of the respondents mentioned that difficulty in
sharing Industrial dataset outside the company is one of the major impediments
in University-Industry collaboration.
