Establishment of an open data policy for Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions, appreciation for invited reviewers, and acknowledgement of volunteers who made audio recordings

"In April 2016, Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions adopted an open data policy [1]. This step was taken to prevent “questionable research practices” and “sloppy science” [2]. The importance of open data policies was stressed at the 2014 Crossref annual meeting by Laurie Goodman of GigaScience as follows: “Open data sharing would benefit the authors as well as the general public and reduce the publication of false and irreproducible results” [3]. When an open data policy is adopted, editors can be proud of guaranteeing the replicability of results from the raw data generated from research. Therefore, this policy aims to ensure the scientific soundness of the studies published in the journal, which is the most important characteristic of the journal from the perspective of the editor. Creativity is difficult to assess because it varies according to the characteristics of the journal, such as its publication region, readers, authors, and editors. Another major contribution of data sharing to academic societies is to provide real data that can be analyzed to confirm theoretical work using simulated data. In the field of educational measurement, hypotheses are usually tested in 3 steps: (1) building a new model or method; (2) identifying the best model or method by using simulated data; and (3) applying the new model or method to real data. If the raw data of a high-stakes examinations with a sufficient number of examinees are opened to researchers in the field of educational measurement, they will be able to work more efficiently and be more motivated. It is difficult to find a journal with this kind of open data policy among the international journals dealing with education that are indexed in Medline, PubMed Central, SCOPUS, and the Web of Science Core Collection...."

Huh, Sun. “Establishment of an Open Data Policy for Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions, Appreciation for Invited Reviewers, and Acknowledgement of Volunteers Who Made Audio Recordings.” Ed. A Ra Cho. Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions 14 (2017): 37. PMC. Web. 18 May 2018.