By John Borghi and Daniella Lowenberg
Yesterday, through quotes and anecdotes, we outlined reasons why researchers should consider making their data open. We’ll dive deeper into some of these reasons tomorrow and on Friday, but today we’re focused on mandates.
Increasingly funding agencies and scholarly publishers are mandating that researchers open up their data. Different agencies and publishers have different policies so, if you are a researcher, it can be difficult to understand exactly what you need to do and how you should go about doing it. To help, we’ve compiled a list of links and resources.
Funder Policy Guidance:
The links below outline US federal funding policies as well as non profit and private funder policies. We also recommend getting in touch with your Research Development & Grants office if you have any questions about how the policy may apply to your grant funded research.
US Federal Agency Policies:
http://datasharing.sparcopen.org/data
http://www.library.cmu.edu/datapub/sc/publicaccess/policies/usgovfunders
Global & Private Funder Policies:
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Information/Open-Access-Policy
https://wellcome.ac.uk/funding/managing-grant/policy-data-software-materials-management-and-sharing
Publisher Policy Guidance:
Below are a list of publishers that oversee thousands of the world’s journals and their applicable data policies. If you have questions about how to comply with these policies we recommend getting in touch with the journal you are aiming to submit to during the research process or before submission to expedite peer review and comply with journal requirements. It is also important to note that if the journal you are submitting to requires data to be publicly available this means that the data underlying the results and conclusions of the manuscript must be submitted, not necessarily the entire study. These data are typically the values behind statistics, data extracted from images, qualitative excerpts, and data necessary to replicate the conclusions.
PLOS: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability
Elsevier: https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/research-data#Policy
Springer-Nature: https://www.springernature.com/gp/authors/research-data-policy/springer-nature-journals-data-policy-type/12327134
PNAS: http://www.pnas.org/site/authors/editorialpolicies.xhtml#xi
Resources, Services, and Tools (The How)
Thinking about and preparing your data for publication and free access requires planning before and during the research process. Check out the free Data Management Plan (DMP) Tool: www.dmptool.org
For researchers at participating UC campuses, earth science and ecology (DataONE), and researchers submitting to the UC Press journals Elementa and Collabra, check out Dash, a data publishing platform: dash.ucop.edu
We also recommend checking out www.re3data.org and https://fairsharing.org for standards in your field and repositories both in your field or generally that will help you meet funder and publisher requirements and make your data open.
If you are a UC researcher, click on the name of your campus below for library resources to support researchers with managing, archiving, and sharing research data
