Research data sharing policy

Research data sharing policy

/ Wed, 07/31/2024 - 13:08

Abstract

These guidelines help Diamond OA publishers and service providers implement a research data sharing policy, recognising the essential role of the availability of the article's underlying research data in supporting conclusions and reproducibility. 

It’s a good practice to make data available to editors and reviewers during the manuscript review process and, if possible, make it available to everyone by the time of publication in a FAIR manner through repositories, providing persistent identifiers (PIDs) and linking from the publication to the research data and from the research data to the publication. 

Main Text

Re-use our model wording below to develop your research data sharing policy: 

[A journal/ publisher] encourages/requires [select your preferred option] authors to share research data that are needed to confirm the results published in the manuscript and/or enhance the published manuscript under the principle ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’. We encourage authors to share supporting software applications, high-resolution images, background datasets, sound or video clips, large appendices, data tables and other relevant items that cannot be included in the article. 

Authors may deposit relevant data in a FAIR-compliant repository – institutional, disciplinary, or general-purpose (e.g. Zenodo). Assistance in finding a FAIR compliant repository can be found here: https://repositoryfinder.datacite.org/ and https://www.re3data.org/. Authors should also provide via the repository any information needed to replicate, validate, and/or reuse the results / their study and analysis of the research data. This includes details of any software, instruments and other tools used to process the results. Where possible, the tools and instruments themselves should also be provided. A DOI will be assigned to each research data file, enabling the research data to be cited the same way as publications. Authors affirm that data protection regulations, ethical standards, third party copyright and other rights have been respected in the process of collecting, processing and sharing data. 

Exceptions: We recognize that open sharing of data may not always be feasible. Exceptions to open access to research data underlying publications include the following: obligation to protect results, confidentiality obligations, security obligations, the obligation to protect personal data and other legitimate constraints. Where open access is not provided to the data needed to validate the conclusions of a publication that reports original results, authors should make metadata available explaining the research and access rules to the data.  

If data access is restricted for ethical or security reasons, the manuscript must include:

  • a description of the restrictions on the data;
  • what, if anything, the relevant Institutional Review Board (IRB) or equivalent said about the data sharing; and
  • all necessary information required for a reader or reviewer to apply for access to the data and the conditions under which access will be granted.


In instances where the data cannot be made available, the manuscript must include:

  • an explanation of the data protection concern;
  • any intermediary data that can be de-identified without compromising anonymity;
  • what, if anything, the relevant IRB or equivalent said about data sharing; and
  • where applicable, all necessary information required for a reader or peer reviewer to apply for access to the data and the conditions under which access will be granted.


Discipline-specific considerations

Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Where applicable, the studies must have been approved by an appropriate Ethics Committee. The identity of the research subject should be anonymized whenever possible. For research involving human subjects, informed consent (or other legal grounds, e.g. from GDPR, Article 6) to participate in the study must be obtained from participants (or their legal guardian). 


Tips:

  • Special attention should be paid to data protection issues, specifically around GDPR and / or other national or regional data protection policies (See more in GDPR and Personal data section). Where human data cannot be effectively de-identified, data must not be shared in order to protect participant privacy, unless the individuals have given explicit written consent that their identifiable data can be made publicly available. 
  • Research data should be linked from a Data Accessibility Statement within the submitted paper, which will be made public upon publication. A ‘Data Accessibility Statement’ should be added to the submission, prior to the reference list, providing the details of the data accessibility, including the DOI linking to it. If the data is restricted in any way and/or is not being made available within the journal publication, a statement from the author should be provided to explain why. 
  • The open research data must be deposited under an open license that permits unrestricted access (e.g., CC0, CC-BY). More restrictive licenses should only be used if there is a valid reason to do so (e.g., legal). 
  • Authors should be asked to 
    • Check whether the repository where the research data is deposited has a sustainability model. The journal can indicate preferred repositories.
    • Provide a version of the deposited data in an open, non-proprietary format. 
    • Describe the deposited data in such a way that a third party can make sense of it (e.g., sensible column headers, descriptions in a readme text file). 
    • When citing or making claims based on data, provide the reference to data in the same way as they cite publications. We recommend the format proposed by the FORCE11 Data Citation Principles.


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This article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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GDPR
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Persistent identifiers
Preservation
Research data
Research integrity