Publishers and data access statements – Leeds University Library Blog

"I’ll benevolently assume it’s careless rather than malicious, but the number of issues we have with data access statements in published journal articles certainly betrays a considerable lack of care!

It’s not unusual for a statement to disappear entirely during the editing process, which may or may not be replaced on request, or DOIs are frequently incorrectly formatted so they don’t resolve (examples below). A common phenomenon is where (presumably automatic) formatting prepends something that breaks the link – dx.doi.org or doi.org so you end up with something like dx.doi.org/doi.org/10.5518/180 – or even http://www.doi.org (which would never work anyway). Again, sometimes these are fixed (when we spot them at all) and sometimes they aren’t, even with repeated correspondence, sending a letter a week, like Andy Dufresne in the Shawshank Redemption

One explanation, perhaps, is that the practice still isn’t fully mainstream, despite the RCUK Common Principles on Data Policy stating that published results should always include information on how to access the supporting data (RCUK, 2015). Meanwhile, according to the RCUK Concordat on Open Research Data “publishers should enable the formal citation of data in articles”, however, there is currently no standardised method to describe how supporting data can be accessed. Moreover many journals (still) include data as “supplementary” information which is unlikely to have a unique identifier, may  sit behind a journal pay wall and not be readily discoverable (see this post from David Kernohan for further discussion – Research Data Management, journals and supplementary materials.)

At Leeds we advise that data files should be deposited in a recognised repository to provide long term curation with appropriate metadata and to enable proper citation and that a prominent data availability statement should be included in the body of the paper AND as an entry in the reference list, but we’ll generally see one or the other. Or neither...."