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CC BY-NC 4.0 · Arch Plast Surg 2019; 46(06): 493-497
DOI: 10.5999/aps.2019.01515
Editorial

Recent trends in medical journals’ data sharing policies and statements of data availability

Sun Huh 
Department of Parasitology and Institute of Medical Education, Hallym University College of Medicine, Chuncheon, Korea
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Data sharing is defined as “making data available to people other than those who have generated them” [1]. It has become a mandatory process in scientific journals in a variety of fields, including oceanology, ecology, and genomics [2]. In those fields, specific data repositories are recommended as part of journals’ policies. For example, sequence data of genes and proteins are usually deposited in the United States National Center for Biological Information (NCBI) database or other designated field-specific databases. Besides those specific types of data, sharing of data in general is also required. The adoption of data sharing policies may have been accelerated by the third version of the “Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing” drafted by the Committee on Publication Ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and the World Association of Medical Editors, which includes “journal policies on data sharing and reproducibility” as the fourth sub-item under publication ethics. Only 227 (29.1%) of 781 academic society-published journals listed in the Science Citation Index Expanded fulfilled this sub-item [3]. This sub-item does not mean that adoption of data sharing is mandatory; instead, it refers to whether a journal’s data sharing policy has been announced by its publisher or editor. Satisfying this sub-item is a prerequisite for application to PubMed Central, administered by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), which looks for ongoing publisher conformance with Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing [4]. Therefore, even if an editor does not plan on adopting a data sharing policy, he or she should announce the “journal policies on data sharing and reproducibility.”

This editorial aims to help editors prepare for adopting a data sharing policy and making an announcement on their journal’s data sharing policy. Specifically, it addresses the following points: the advantages and limitations of data sharing policies, the present situation of data sharing policies in Korea, the various levels of data sharing, repository sites for general data sharing, descriptions of statements of data availability in the instructions to authors, in-text descriptions of datasets, and citations of data repositories in the References section.



Publication History

Received: 16 October 2019

Accepted: 24 October 2019

Article published online:
25 March 2022

© 2019. The Korean Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, permitting unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

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