4. Promoting Data Sharing
In November 2018, during International Data Week [20] we began a
campaign to implement the Wiley “Expects Data” data sharing policy
broadly. Our goal was to step-up the support we offered to researchers
who want or need to share their data, by transitioning journals from our
“Encourages Data” data sharing policy to “Expects Data” if they were
ready [13].
First we created a toolkit that would brief publishing colleagues, so
they could effectively liaise with editors of journals, and then –
together – to implement the requirements of the “Expects Data”
policy, namely by including data availability statements and data
citations in every article. The data sharing team provided everything
that journals would need, including support for authors in the form of
template data availability statements, instructions for how to cite the
data they are sharing, and advice on finding appropriate repositories at
which to share their data
[14].
We began our implementation plan by selecting journals serving
disciplines that were most ready for data sharing, and introduced our
new Expects Data policy to those journals first.
At that time, November 2018, c. 1,500+ journals had the entry-level
“Encourages Data” data sharing policy, and had no specific
requirements for data sharing by researchers. We also published a much
smaller number of journals (c. 20+) that had adopted an earlier version
of our “Expects Data” policy, that emphasized the benefits of sharing
data to researchers, but that still had no specific requirements for
data sharing. Alongside this, we published a similarly small number of
journals with a “Mandates Data” policy (c. 20), among which are the
leading journals from the Wiley evolutionary biology portfolio.
Since 2018 we have made significant progress at Wiley. By March 2019
over 160 journals have adopted and implemented our “Expects Data”
policy, or our Mandates Data policy. Examples of these journals are
shown in Table 3 below. Each now requires data availability statements
in every article it publishes, as well as data citations. To make the
whole process easy for research authors, we created a series of standard
templates to complete their data availability statements, shared in
Table 4.