JMIR Publications Policy on including a Data Availability Statement
JMIR Publications strongly recommends authors to include a Data Availability statement in any submitted manuscript that contains original research (this includes: Original Research, Research Letters, Reviews); see JMIR Publications article types). If code was generated during the study, then this also should be included in the statement.
A submission to JMIR Publications journals implies that materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any researcher wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes, without breaching participant confidentiality.
Note that authors should be prepared to submit (anonymised) underlying study data, if requested by the journal for inspection or verification.
Additionally, some JMIR Publications journals require a Data Availability statement, including the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
We encourage authors to ensure that their data sets are either deposited or available to readers in one or more of the following options:
- data is deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate);
- data is supplied in supporting files available for download along with the published manuscript (see What are the guidelines for supplementary files (figures, Multimedia Appendix, additional material for reviewers/editors only)?);
- data is submitted to and published in JMIR Data and then is cited in the manuscript (see Sharing Data in JMIR Data);
- data is presented in the main manuscript.
The Data Availability statement is placed after the Acknowledgements (if there is an Acknowledgements section).
A Data Availability statement should include:
- information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found; this includes references to publicly archived data sets analyzed or generated during the study, if applicable; and
- whether data are available on request from the authors; or
- if data is not publicly archived or available, this should still be disclosed, and include (1) reason(s) for unavailability; and (2) how the data could be requested, with or without any requirements for requests for data.
Example Data Availability Statements
Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple data sets):
- "The datasets generated or analyzed during this study are available in the [NAME] repository [IN-TEXT CITATION]." The data citation should include a persistent identifier (eg, web URL or DOI) cited per journal style in the reference list.
- "The datasets generated or analyzed during this study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request."
- "The datasets generated or analyzed during this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request."
- "Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no data sets were generated or analyzed during this study."
- "All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files]."
Sharing Data in JMIR Data
JMIR Data publishes data sets with a short narrative. This is an equivalent option to share data which can then be cited and made publicly available to reviewers and readers. To submit a data set, visit the JMIR Data Instructions for Authors.
Data sets submitted to JMIR Data undergo peer review and evaluation by an editor. After acceptance and publication, the data set and accompanying manuscript describing the data set are published with a DOI. This can the be included in a Data Availability statement.
Requests for study data
In the event of a post-publication review on a published manuscript, or other potential issues such as ethical issues which may arise in the course of manuscript peer review, authors may be asked to provide (anonymized) data, code, or other material related to the study, if it is deemed necessary by JMIR Publications staff for investigative purposes. COPE encourages data sharing as an increasingly necessary component of research reproducibility and transparency.