Our journal encourages and enables authors to share data that supports your research publication where appropriate, and enables you to interlink the data with your published articles. Research data refers to the results of observations or experimentation that validate research findings. To facilitate reproducibility and data reuse, this journal also encourages you to share your software, code, models, algorithms, protocols, methods and other useful materials related to the project.

Authors are required to submit a data-sharing statement form with their manuscript. If the article is accepted for publication, the Data Availability Statement will be published (online only) alongside the article. Data sharing statements include information regarding whether individual de-identified participant data (including data dictionaries) will be shared (n.b. “undecided” is not an acceptable answer) and/or what data in particular will be shared. They may also indicate whether additional related documents will be available (e.g., study protocol or a statistical analysis plan) as well as when and for how long the data will be available and what access criteria data will be shared (including with whom, for what types of analyses, and by what mechanism).

Data Statement

To foster transparency, we encourage authors to state the availability of their data in the submission. This may be a requirement of your funding body or institution. If their data is unavailable to access or unsuitable to post, authors will have the opportunity to indicate why during the submission process, for example by stating that the research data is confidential. The statement will appear with their published article.

Data Linking

If authors have made their research data available in a data repository, they can link their article directly to the data set. Our Journal collaborates with several repositories to link articles with relevant repositories, giving readers access to underlying data that gives them a better understanding of the research described.