Abstract
The practices for if and how scholarly journals instruct research data for published research to be shared is an area where a lot of changes have been happening as science policy moves towards facilitating open science, and subject-specific repositories and practices are established. This study provides an analysis of the research data sharing policies of highly-cited journals in the fields of neuroscience, physics, and operations research as of May 2019. For these 120 journals, 40 journals per subject category, a unified policy coding framework was developed to capture the most central elements of each policy, i.e. what, when, and where research data is instructed to be shared. The results affirm that considerable differences between research fields remain when it comes to policy existence, strength, and specificity. The findings revealed that one of the most important factors influencing the dimensions of what, where and when of research data policies was whether the journal’s scope included specific data types related to life sciences which have established methods of sharing through community-endorsed public repositories. The findings surface the future research potential of approaching policy analysis on the publisher-level as well as on the journal-level. The collected data and coding framework is provided as open data to facilitate future research and journal policy monitoring.
Highlights
The connection between a research article and its underlying data is strong and direct for authors involved in the preparation process of article manuscripts, but the immediate link can weaken or become completely absent as the article gets published without any data to support the reported findings being made available for readers to access
Journal data sharing policies becoming more common and detailed can be perceived as part of the larger push towards open science driven by science policy as well as individual researchers, where open data sharing is a central element for making research more transparent, reproducible, and increasing its potential impact (McKiernan et al 2016)
Research data policies were common within the editorial policies of the neuroscience, physics and operations research journals examined in the present study: from all 120 journals, 92 (c. 77%) had incorporated a research data policy into their editorial processes
Summary
The connection between a research article and its underlying data is strong and direct for authors involved in the preparation process of article manuscripts, but the immediate link can weaken or become completely absent as the article gets published without any data to support the reported findings being made available for readers to access. Due to the large emphasis on journal publications for disseminating new research findings within most disciplines, journal data sharing policies have a large potential influence on what, when, and where researchers make their research data available. As the study reported in the present article will look closer at, some journals require authors to make the data associated with published articles publicly available. This requirement might act as a data sharing incentive for authors (as in “In order to get published in this forum I will have to make my data available, it is worth the extra effort”), and as a potential deterrent for reluctant authors (as in “I will publish in some other journal that does not require data sharing for its articles”). The influence of data sharing requirements on how researchers select which grants to apply financing from and which journals to publish in is still largely unknown
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