FLICKR, MISSERIONEffective next week, PLOS journals will require that submitting authors provide a statement about where their data can be freely accessed upon a paper’s publication. Some researchers may be able to include all relevant data within their manuscripts or as part of the supplementary materials; others will have to direct readers to a public data repository—like GenBank, FigShare, or Dryad—where this information is indexed.
While the open-access publisher has always included data sharing as part of its overall mission, Theodora Bloom, editorial director of PLOS Biology, said this was more of an implicit ethos than an explicit directive. “It said in our instructions [that] by submitting, you’re agreeing to share,” she told The Scientist. “Now they’re being asked to make an active statement.”
Tom Jefferson, an epidemiologist at the nonprofit The Cochrane Collaboration and a long-time advocate for the sharing of clinical trial data, applauded the initiative. “If people want to submit stuff for publication [to open-access journals], it’s absolutely right that they should make all the data available,” he said.
Beyond potentially helping independent investigators reproduce published science, data sharing also opens “the possibility of making new discoveries ...
