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.