Data Availability at Hindawi | About Hindawi

"We believe publishers must support funders and researchers in making this transition possible. As data availability policies have become more common, however, researchers and others have raised concerns about enforced data sharing. These include patient privacy, the release of sensitive and confidential information, and the dependence of some research on commercially licensed datasets. Individual scientific communities are at different stages of understanding how best to share and maximize the usefulness of their data. Whilst some fields are used to openly sharing data for community use, others do not yet share this culture.

Hindawi publishes across a wide range of disciplines, and we are sensitive to the needs of individual communities to develop distinct data sharing practices. However, we now feel that Open Data efforts are now sufficiently well advanced that we are ready to move towards data sharing guidelines across all of our journals.

Initially, we intend to ask our authors to include a Data Availability Statement in all submissions, to increase transparency around whether and how others may access the underlying data. This is the first step towards developing a more comprehensive Open Data policy. This process will be informed by feedback from our Editorial Board Members, our authors, our readers, and other members of the scientific community. You can get in touch via community@hindawi.com."