Data Availability Statements (DAS)

The University of Portsmouth Research Data Management Policy requires you, either as (i) the holder of the data and/or (ii) the corresponding author, to ensure any data appearing in published work is held in OA accessible format 1.

This in turn requires that you include a Data Availability Statement in all published works (whether or not the publisher explicitly requires a DAS) to ensure OA data compliance. The DAS simply tells the reader where they can find/access a copy of your data. 

We suggest the DAS should, in the absence of alternate guidance from the publisher, be included simply as a comment in the data/methods section of your paper. Alternatively it could be included as: a footnote on the first page of the published work; an endnote immediately following the concluding section of the work [and before the bibliography]; a comment in the Acknowledgements.

The DAS can take a number of forms, but to aid researchers we provide below the most common reasons for including a DAS – and suggest possible wordings in each case:

  • CASE 1: The work to be published does not contain any data /no new data 2
    • Suggested wording: No [new] data were created or analysed in the article/book/other.
  • CASE 2: Data or references (including links to secondary data-sets) are contained within the published work itself.
    • Suggested wording: The authors confirm that the data from which the findings of this study are derived are available within the article/book/other (and/or) its supplementary materials.
  • CASE 3: The research data employed is openly available 3.
    • Suggested wording: The data from which the findings of this research are derived are available at [location] 4.
  •  CASE 4: Supporting research data are available on request from the authors 5
    • Suggested wording: The data from which the findings of this research are derived are available upon request from (Name of contact). The data are not publicly available due to … [explain reason].
  • CASE 5: Supporting research data are not openly available.
    • Suggested wording: Due to the nature of this research, participants in this study did not agree to the data being shared publicly, so supporting data are not available.

Notes:

If you are neither the corresponding author nor have agreed access to data for DM purposes, then you are not responsible for the DM OA requirement.

By ‘no new data’ we mean that no new dataset necessary for reproduction has been collected/generated/derived.

In instances where there is an embargo period, this embargo period should be denoted in the DAS.

Insert the repository name, URL/DOI, reference number, or where the data is curated, as relevant in order to allow the reader to source the data that you have used for themselves. 

Cases 4 and 5 are expected to be more the exception rather than the rule and colleagues are strongly advised to check with the UoP Research Data Officer (researchdata@port.ac.uk) before submitting such a DAS