Open Data policy

Availability and findability of data are required for science to become a public good and serve society for the improvement of life quality for all. According to the Committee on Data of the International Science Council - CODATA,

“data produced by research and susceptible to be used for research should be as open as possible and as closed as necessary”.

How should data be shared - The FAIR Principles of Data Sharing 


Data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. These are the four FAIR Principles of Data Sharing (for more details on what each principle means, see GO FAIR, https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/). 

The UP Data Policy


Our Open Access policy in Ubiquity Press includes data. Editors should encourage authors to publish their data in recommended repositories as openly available as possible and to include a Data Availability Statement in their manuscripts.

Editors should also ensure that data is cited in the manuscript text and included in the References (with a DOI link to them). This action increases the connection between the publication, the data and external sources, enhancing the network of findable data.

If for any reason, making data openly available is not possible, editors should require that the Data Availability Statement provides an appropriate explanation.

Editors should also encourage authors to submit data papers which are good ways to increase visibility and retrievability of data. Ubiquity Press publishes a series of data journals that cover most disciplines.

Ubiquity Press will be revising its Open Data Policy in 2023. If you have any relevant feedback, don’t hesitate to contact your editorial account manager.


Dos

  • Routinely remind all authors of our strong recommendation for Open Data. 
  • At the very minimum, require a Data Accessibility Statement.
  • Address any concerns by authors. Your editorial account manager is well informed and can support you.
  • There may be legal or ethical reasons restricting authors from sharing data or requiring them to embargo for a period of time. Be prepared to listen to authors and discuss any issues with your editorial account manager.
  • Check for ethics and consent information for the research project. This should be present within the article anyway, and required by the research institution, however the consent of human participants and the publication of data in an anonymous method should have been detailed.
  • Be flexible on data repositories authors choose to use. For a checklist of minimum requirements see our peer review criteria, e.g https://openhealthdata.metajnl.com/about/editorialPolicies/#peerReviewProcess .
  • Be thorough when checking Data Availability Statements. Do links resolve? Does the deposited dataset meet our peer review requirements (e.g. https://openhealthdata.metajnl.com/about/editorialPolicies/#peerReviewProcess )? This is not a waste of time.

Dont’s

  • Do not overlook data and data concerns when you review a submission to your journal.

Further resources

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