IOP Publishing is trialing a new data policy on three of its journals to encourage and support authors to make the data underpinning their article more accessible.
The trial will begin in July on the journals Environmental Research Letters, Journal of Physics: Complexity, and Machine Learning: Science and Technology and will be extended to five additional IOP Publishing journals after three months.
The policy requires authors to include a data availability statement with their article, indicating whether data is accessible and, if so, where it can be found and under what licensing terms. The policy also strongly encourages authors to share their data.
Marc Gillett, Head of Publishing Operations at IOP Publishing, said: "In the interests of research transparency and reproducibility, we hope our authors will make their data available to readers, referees and editors.
"Running this pilot scheme will help us to formalise our wider data policies and develop different approaches to suit the numerous scientific communities our journals serve.
"It also enables us to test the response to data availability statements from those communities. At the same time, we will trial the provision of an easy data deposition service with Figshare where, with this service provided by IOP Publishing, authors will be able to deposit up to 5GB of data free of charge and refer to this in their data availability statement."
