What a Journal Means by Data Availability

Academic and student work · 741 words · about 3 minutes to read

PLOS ONE makes publication conditional on compliance with its data policy, and says so in those words. Where restrictions on access come to light after publication, the journal reserves the right to post a correction or publish an editorial expression of concern. It may also contact the authors' institutions and funders, or in extreme cases retract the publication.¹

That is not a formatting requirement with a formatting consequence. It is a condition of publication with a post-publication remedy attached, and it turns on a paragraph most authors write last. PLOS ONE's submission guidelines list it among the requirements a manuscript must satisfy.²

What the statement has to contain

A data availability statement describes how the authors comply with the policy. Where data are deposited, it must name the repository or repositories and give digital object identifiers, accession numbers or codes, or other persistent identifiers for all relevant data.¹

Three forms are acceptable. Deposit in a repository is strongly recommended, whether subject-specific or a cross-disciplinary generalist repository. Data may be included in supporting information files where the formats are standard in the field. Data management plans are encouraged but are not the primary route.¹

Every element of that is checkable before submission by someone who does not work in the field. A named repository is present or absent. An identifier is present or absent, and it either resolves or it does not.

The phrase that causes most of the trouble

Data available on request is accepted only in narrow circumstances, and the narrowness is the point.

For human research data, authors must supply contact information for a data access committee, an ethics committee, or another institutional body, and explain the restrictions in detail. Sensitive data such as endangered species locations or archaeological sites may be made available on request after consulting the relevant field guidelines.¹

One sentence in the policy disposes of the version authors most often write. It is not acceptable for an author to be the sole named individual responsible for ensuring data access.¹

A statement naming the corresponding author as the route to the data is therefore not a restricted-access statement. It is a non-compliant one, and the journal has said what may follow.

Why this is an editing problem and not only a data problem

The statement has to agree with three other parts of the manuscript. On a multi-author paper written over two years it frequently does not, and nobody has been made responsible for noticing.

It has to agree with the methods section about what data exist, which is the same both-directions check a reference list needs. It has to agree with the ethics statement about what may be shared. And it has to agree with the supporting information about what was actually deposited.

Checking those against each other is copy editing as Editors Canada defines it, covering correctness, accuracy, consistency, and completeness.³ Its standards cover verifying that identifiers such as URLs work, and that supporting elements agree with the text.⁴

An editor cannot verify that a dataset is complete. An editor can verify that the paper describes the same dataset in four places, and that every identifier in the statement resolves to something. Those are different jobs, and only one of them needs the field.

The pass, in order

Every dataset mentioned anywhere in the manuscript is listed. Every identifier in the statement is opened and confirmed to resolve. The statement is read against the methods, the ethics statement, and the supporting information captions, and each disagreement is recorded.

Where the statement claims a restriction, the named contact is checked as a body rather than a person. The policy distinguishes the two, and that single check catches the most common non-compliant statement.¹

None of that requires the field, and all of it is faster before submission than after publication. The post-publication version of this conversation involves the journal.

Where the author's authority begins

Whether data can be shared, what a restriction rests on, whether an ethics approval permits deposit, and which repository is appropriate are questions for the authors and their institution. An editor who answered one would be making a representation on the authors' behalf to a journal.

Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including unpublished data, manuscripts under review, and correspondence with a journal or an ethics committee. We work on journal articles and academic and research documents to whatever specification the journal publishes.

Authors who write the data availability statement first, before the discussion, generally write a truer one. It is easier to describe what exists than to justify afterward why a paragraph written in a hurry said something the methods section does not support.

References

PLOS ONE, Data Availability. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability ↩
PLOS ONE, Submission Guidelines. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines ↩
Editors Canada, Definitions of Editorial Skills, June 2019. https://editors.ca/hire-an-editor/skills/ ↩
Editors Canada, Professional Editorial Standards 2024: D. Standards for Copy Editing. https://editors.ca/publications/professional-editorial-standards/copy-editing/ ↩

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