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:

1 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.

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

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

4 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. 

5 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