PLOS Biology: Data Access for the Open Access Literature: PLOS's Data Policy

"Data are any and all of the digital materials that are collected and analyzed in the pursuit of scientific advances. In line with its stance on providing Open Access to research articles themselves, PLOS strongly believes that, to best foster scientific progress, the underlying data should be made freely available for researchers to use, wherever this is legal and ethical. Data availability allows validation, replication, reanalysis, new analysis, reinterpretation, or inclusion into meta-analyses, and facilitates reproducibility of research [1]. Making data available for all these uses provides a better “bang for the buck” out of scientific research, much of which is funded from public or nonprofit sources. Ultimately, our viewpoint is quite simple: Ensuring access to the underlying data should be an intrinsic part of the scientific publishing process ... Since their inception PLOS journals have requested that data be available, but we believe that providing more specific instructions for authors regarding appropriate data deposition options, and providing more information in the published article regarding how to access data, are important for both general readers and for research users of the research we publish. As a result, PLOS posted a revised Data Policy for comment on December 12, 2013 [2], and we are implementing the policy (Box 1) as of March 1, 2014. Authors of all research articles submitted to any PLOS journal on or after March 1 are required to include a statement detailing the availability of all data discussed in the manuscript ..."