Research Data and Data Availability Policy

Journal of Accounting and Management (JAM)  |  e-ISSN 3048-345X

1. Purpose and Scope

This policy promotes verification, reproducibility, appropriate reuse, and long-term stewardship of the evidence supporting articles published by JAM. It applies to original research and, where relevant, to reviews, conceptual articles, technical articles, and case studies that create, collect, transform, analyze, or reuse data.

The policy applies during research planning, data collection, analysis, submission, peer review, publication, and post-publication assessment. Requirements imposed by law, research participants’ consent, ethics committees, data providers, institutions, or funders continue to apply. Where another requirement is stricter, authors must comply with the stricter requirement and explain the resulting access conditions.

2. What Counts as Research Data?

Research data are the materials and records required to understand, evaluate, or reproduce the findings reported in a manuscript. Depending on the study, these may include:

Authors are not normally required to share every file created during a project. They must preserve and, where permitted, provide the minimum complete set needed to support the article’s reported results, together with sufficient documentation to interpret it.

3. Core Responsibilities of Authors

• Plan how data will be collected, documented, secured, backed up, retained, shared, and disposed of before data collection begins.
• Maintain accurate records of provenance, collection instruments, inclusion and exclusion decisions, cleaning, transformations, coding, analytical procedures, software, and file versions.
• Protect confidential information and collect only the personal or organizational data necessary for the research purpose.
• Ensure that consent forms, permissions, contracts, and ethics approvals are compatible with the proposed storage and sharing arrangements.
• Verify that data are accurate, complete, consistent with the manuscript, and free from fabrication, falsification, or inappropriate manipulation.
• Deposit shareable data, metadata, documentation, and relevant analysis materials in an appropriate repository whenever practicable.
• Include a Data Availability Statement in every submitted manuscript, including when no new data were generated or when access must be restricted.
• Respond promptly and honestly to reasonable editorial requests concerning data, documentation, code, or analysis.

4. Data Management and Documentation

A formal Data Management Plan is recommended for all empirical studies and may be required by an institution, funder, ethics committee, or editor. The plan should be proportionate to the study and address:

5. Repositories, Formats, and Persistent Access

Authors should use a trusted disciplinary, institutional, or general-purpose repository that provides stable access, descriptive metadata, versioning, and a persistent identifier such as a DOI. Examples of general repositories include Zenodo and the Open Science Framework; a suitable recognized disciplinary or institutional repository is preferred when available.

• Use open, non-proprietary, and widely readable file formats where feasible.
• Deposit a readme file, codebook or data dictionary, units, labels, provenance, collection dates, software and version information, and instructions necessary to understand or reproduce the analysis.
• Assign a clear reuse license when the authors have authority to do so and explain any conditions governing reuse.
• Identify the exact dataset version supporting the article. Subsequent changes should create a new version rather than silently replacing the cited record.
• A personal website, temporary file-transfer link, email attachment, or unarchived cloud folder is not an adequate substitute for a repository.
• Source code may be developed on a version-control platform, but the version supporting publication should also be archived in a repository that provides a persistent identifier.

6. Data Availability Statement

A distinct Data Availability Statement must appear in the manuscript before the References. It must accurately identify the availability of the data, code, and other materials supporting the article. It must not promise access that the authors are unable or unauthorized to provide.

7. Sensitive, Personal, and Confidential Data

JAM does not require public release when sharing would breach informed consent, privacy, confidentiality, law, ethics approval, contractual duties, legitimate organizational confidentiality, security, or community rights. Authors must nevertheless preserve appropriate evidence and state why access is restricted.

• Remove direct identifiers and assess the risk of re-identification from indirect identifiers and linked datasets.
• Do not assume that removing names makes a dataset anonymous. Small samples, detailed locations, job titles, organizations, quotations, and financial records may permit re-identification.
• Use controlled access, data-use agreements, secure environments, aggregation, masking, synthetic data, or another suitable safeguard when open release is unsafe.
• Do not publicly deposit confidential interview recordings, identifiable transcripts, personal contact details, authentication credentials, or commercially sensitive records without explicit lawful authority.
• If de-identification would destroy the analytical value of the data, explain the restriction and provide metadata or a description that can safely be disclosed.

Ethical approval and participant-consent requirements are governed by JAM’s separate Ethical Oversight Policy. Processing of personal information entered into OJS is governed by the Privacy Statement.

8. Third-Party, Proprietary, and Secondary Data

Authors using data obtained from companies, government bodies, commercial databases, financial-information providers, institutions, or other third parties must comply with the provider’s license, terms of use, confidentiality requirements, and applicable law.

• The original dataset must be properly cited and its source, version, access date, selection criteria, and relevant transformations must be reported.
• Authors must not upload, redistribute, or sublicense third-party data unless authorized.
• The Data Availability Statement must explain how an eligible reader may obtain the same or equivalent access from the original provider.
• Editors may request evidence that the authors were entitled to access and use the data.
• Restrictions created solely after analysis to avoid scrutiny are not acceptable.

9. Data Citation and Credit

Datasets are legitimate research outputs and must be cited when they provide evidence for a claim. A dataset citation should appear in the text where relevant and in the References, not only in the Data Availability Statement.

10. Software, Code, Models, and Analytical Materials

When findings depend materially on custom code, statistical syntax, spreadsheets, computational models, algorithms, or automated workflows, authors should provide the relevant version and sufficient instructions to reproduce the reported analysis, subject to justified restrictions.

• Report the software name, version, packages, major parameters, model specifications, random seeds where applicable, and computational environment needed to interpret the work.
• Remove passwords, private keys, access tokens, personal information, and confidential paths before sharing code.
• For proprietary software or confidential code, provide a sufficiently detailed description and explain the access restriction.
• Third-party software and code must be cited and used under their applicable licenses.

11. Data During Editorial Review

Editors may request the underlying data, code, instruments, output, documentation, permissions, or access information needed to evaluate the manuscript. Where data cannot be shared with reviewers, the authors should explain the restriction and work with the editor to identify a lawful and secure verification method.

• Requested materials are handled as confidential editorial records and must not be used by editors or reviewers for personal advantage.
• The journal may use an independent statistical, methodological, data, or ethics adviser where necessary.
• Unexplained inability or refusal to provide evidence necessary to evaluate central claims may result in delayed review, rejection, or another appropriate editorial action.
• JAM does not require authors to transfer ownership of research data to the journal.

12. Retention, Custodianship, and Secure Disposal

Authors and their institutions should retain the data and documentation supporting a published article for at least five years after publication, or longer when required by law, an institution, a funder, an ethics committee, a contract, disciplinary practice, or an active investigation. A repository deposit intended for long-term preservation is preferred for data that may lawfully be retained and shared.

The responsible data custodian, storage location, access authority, retention schedule, and disposal method should be documented. When secure destruction is required, it must follow applicable consent, ethics, legal, contractual, and institutional requirements and should not occur while a legitimate integrity inquiry, correction, or appeal is unresolved.

13. Post-Publication Requests and Data Concerns

Authors should respond within a reasonable period to legitimate requests made under the published Data Availability Statement. They may require identity verification, a research proposal, ethics approval, a data-use agreement, secure access, or recovery of reasonable direct preparation costs when these conditions were disclosed and are objectively justified.

Concerns about unavailable data, inaccurate statements, data discrepancies, or suspected fabrication or falsification will be assessed under the applicable JAM research-integrity and post-publication policies. If the data record or availability statement must change, JAM may publish a linked correction, expression of concern, or retraction as warranted. The article and repository record must not be silently altered to conceal a material problem.

14. Relationship with Other JAM Policies

This page governs research-data management, availability, repository deposit, access restrictions, citation, retention, and verification. To avoid duplication, the following matters remain governed by their dedicated policies: