Our Data Sharing Policy

Sharing of research data demonstrates the robustness and validity of the research presented in an article by allowing others to reproduce and question results and to reuse the data for teaching and further research. It builds integrity and openness as part of the fabric of the research. For the researcher there are multiple benefits, including increasing exposure to their work.

De Gruyter is collaborating with researchers, institutes, funders, repositories, and other research data infrastructure parties to make data sharing the new normal. As a member of the STM Research Data Program initiative we are participating in the drive to achieve the harmonization and standardization of the research data ecosystem. We follow the guidelines of the 6-policies framework developed by the Research Data Alliance (RDA).

De Gruyter has implemented 4 levels of research data policies, with policy 1 being the most moderate, encouraging the provision of research data, and policy 4 being the most stringent, mandating data sharing which will be peer reviewed as part of the submission process. Please refer to the policies adopted by each journal – journals that have implemented tier 3 or 4 may have individual components integrated to their policies. This information and further instructions for submission of manuscripts can be found on the SUBMIT tab of the journal's homepage.

We acknowledge that not every journal is data-oriented, and it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when privacy of research participants could be compromised. Nevertheless, we provide guidance for authors who want or need to make their research data publicly available. In this way, De Gruyter intends to help authors and journals to comply with funder mandates, to increase the visibility and connectivity of their articles and data, and to improve reader and author service with more consistent links to data.

Good scientific practice requires the archived data to be “FAIR”: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. We recommend the use of community-endorsed data types. If you assign a persistent identifier to your research data by archiving it in a data repository, other researchers will be able to cite your data as well as your published research article.

Where possible, data should be submitted to discipline-specific, community-recognized repositories. In cases where there is no appropriate discipline-specific resource, data may be submitted to a general data repository. Please see https://www.re3data.org/, https://fairsharing.org/, or https://repositoryfinder.datacite.org/ for help finding research data repositories. We strongly recommend using CoreTrustSeal certified repositories.

Data availability statements (DAS) provide information on where research data that support the results and analysis can be found. It may contain links to publicly archived datasets, descriptions of the available data and/or information on how to access non-public data. Authors are responsible for providing truthful and verifiable information in this section. DASs must take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple types of research data):

• The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].
• The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
• Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.
• All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].

We further recommend citing the data that has been shared in the reference list. Data citations should include a persistent identifier, should be included in the reference list using the minimum information recommended by DataCite (Dataset Creator, Dataset Title, Publisher [repository], Publication Year, Identifier [e.g. DOI, Handle or ARK]) and follow journal style.