Data Policy

The sharing and correct management of research data meet the needs for transparency and reusability of scientific research. Research data should be managed according to the FAIR principles, which is a set of guidelines and good practices that describe the characteristics of optimal data management. To guarantee the reproducibility of the research, the data associated with it must be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.

AlmaDL Journals strongly encourages authors to deposit the research data associated to the articles in a trusted data repository and to make them openly available under a Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY) or a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) or an equivalent license, unless an exception applies.

Information about the research data and their availability should be provided in a “Data Availability Statement” (DAS).

The DAS should be included in the submitted paper, prior to the reference list, or provided as a separated file during the submission phase and then made public within the paper upon publication.

When depositing data for a submission, the author(s) should check the following:

  • The repository used to deposit data must be trusted and suitable for this subject and have a sustainability model;

  • Data obtained from third party should be used and shared according to their terms and conditions;

  • The identity of the research subject(s) should be anonymized for privacy. For research involving human subjects, informed consent must be obtained from participants (or their legal guardian);

  • The data must be made available as open as possible and distributed under an open license that permits unrestricted access and reuse (e.g. CC0, CC-BY). More restrictive licenses or access restrictions should be applied under valid motivations;

  • The deposited data should also include a version that is in an open, non-proprietary format;

  • The data must be deposited along with proper documentation to make them intelligible and reusable. A clear description of software used in the research should be included. Where third party proprietary software has been used, an open source alternative must be provided in the article to allow for the replication of the analysis results.

The DAS must be provided at the submission phase and should contain:

  • References including unique identifiers (i.e. DOI, HANDLE, URN, URL) of the dataset(s) available in repositories in open access or after an embargo period;

  • Contact details (i.e. email) of the corresponding author for data available on request that cannot be shared openly, providing motivations for restrictions (e.g. due to commercial, or third party, ethical, or privacy restrictions);

  • References to datasets openly available in public domain.

In addition, for double-blind peer-reviewed journals:

Anonymity of peer-review

To preserve the anonymity during the peer-review, the DSA must be provided according to one of the following options:

  1. Deposit the data in a repository that allows view-only access to datasets that are not yet public (i.e. allowing anonymous display of only the files without context metadata);

  2. Upload the Data Availability Statement as a separate file, which will not be forwarded to the reviewers, and upload the data as a supplementary file in order to send it to the reviewers. Postpone deposit in the repository after acceptance.

In both cases, the data should be made public before the article is published.