PLOS Revises Data Policy: Authors Must Make All Data Publicly Available Without Restriction Upon Publication of Article

From the PLOS Blog:

Access to research results, immediately without restriction, has always been at the heart of PLOS’ mission and the wider Open Access movement. However, without similar access to the data underlying the findings, the article can be of limited use. For this reason, PLOS has always required that authors make their data available to other academic researchers who wish to replicate, reanalyze, or build upon the findings published in our journals.
In an effort to increase access to this data, we are now revising our data-sharing policy for all PLOS journals: authors must make all data publicly available, without restriction, immediately upon publication of the article. Beginning March 3rd, 2014, all authors who submit to a PLOS journal will be asked to provide a Data Availability Statement, describing where and how others can access each dataset that underlies the findings. This Data Availability Statement will be published on the first page of each article.
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What do we mean by publicly available?
All data must be in one of three places:

• the body of the manuscript; this may be appropriate for studies where the dataset is small enough to be presented in a table

• in the supporting information; this may be appropriate for moderately-sized datasets that can be reported in large tables or as compressed files, which can then be downloaded

• in a stable, public repository that provides an accession number or digital object identifier (DOI) for each dataset; there are many repositories that specialize in specific data types, and these are particularly suitable for very large datasets.

Read the Complete PLOS Blog Post
Includes explanation of what “data” means in terms of this policy and info about exceptions.

Coverage

PLOS Pushes Data Sharing  (via The Scientist)

Filed under: Data Files, News, Open Access, PLOS