Research Data Policy

Multidisciplinary Journals (MJ)  |  e-ISSN 3047-8499

1. Purpose, Scope, and Policy Boundary

This policy applies to articles reporting original research and, where relevant, review articles, methodological papers, case studies, computational studies, replications, registered reports, qualitative research, community-based research, humanities research, engineering studies, clinical or health research, and other submissions that rely on identifiable research materials or evidence.

This page governs data availability statements, data management, repository selection, documentation, access, sharing, restrictions, citation, licensing, retention, editorial verification, and post-publication availability. It does not redefine informed consent, ethics approval, privacy, data fabrication, authorship, competing interests, peer-review confidentiality, copyright, or corrective notices. Those subjects remain governed by the policies listed in Section 15.

2. What Counts as Research Data?

Research data are the recorded materials, evidence, observations, or digital objects used to support, validate, reproduce, or understand the findings of a scholarly work. Depending on the discipline, these may include:

Data supporting the article may differ from the complete research archive. Authors should share the materials reasonably necessary to examine the published claims while preserving files required for audit, verification, or later clarification under applicable institutional and legal rules.

3. Core Principles

• Findable: data and metadata should use clear titles, descriptions, keywords, version information, and persistent identifiers where available.
• Accessible: the statement must explain where and under what conditions data can be accessed, including authentication or authorization where necessary.
• Interoperable: authors should use non-proprietary or widely supported formats and discipline-appropriate vocabularies when practicable.
• Reusable: data should include documentation, provenance, methods, variable definitions, code, and a clear licence or terms of use where permitted.
• Responsible: sharing must respect participants, communities, confidentiality, informed consent, intellectual property, security, and applicable law.
• Accurate: deposited materials and their description must correspond to the evidence used in the article and must not be fabricated, falsified, selectively altered, or misleading.

4. Data Availability Statement

Every article that reports original research must contain a clearly labelled Data Availability Statement, normally placed before the References or in another location required by the article template. The statement must identify the option that accurately describes the supporting data.

5. Repository Selection and Deposit

Where public or controlled sharing is permitted, authors should use a recognised discipline-specific, institutional, national, or general-purpose repository. The repository should, where possible:

• assign a persistent identifier such as a DOI or another stable accession number;
• provide durable preservation, versioning, and a clear access route;
• support rich metadata, authorship or creator information, provenance, dates, file formats, and links to the article;
• display an appropriate reuse licence or terms and accommodate access controls when required;
• permit citation, discovery, and correction or withdrawal of a dataset record without silently erasing its history; and
• comply with applicable institutional, funder, disciplinary, legal, security, and ethical requirements.

Personal websites, temporary file-transfer services, private messaging, and ordinary cloud-storage links are not preferred as the sole long-term location because access, version control, preservation, and metadata may be unstable. Small supplementary files may be hosted with the article when appropriate, but a trusted repository is preferred for substantial datasets and code.

6. Documentation, Formats, and Reproducibility

Shared data must be sufficiently documented for a qualified reader to understand what was collected or generated, how it was processed, and how it relates to the article. Relevant materials may include:

• a README file describing the study, folder structure, files, versions, software, and access conditions;
• a data dictionary or codebook defining variables, units, labels, missing values, transformations, and exclusions;
• collection instruments, protocols, interview guides, questionnaires, calibration details, or sampling information;
• analysis code, scripts, model specifications, computational environments, package versions, and random seeds where applicable;
• provenance and version information identifying raw, cleaned, processed, and analysed files; and
• a licence or terms of use and instructions for citing the dataset.

Authors should use open, non-proprietary, or widely supported formats where practicable. When proprietary formats are necessary, authors should provide an accessible export format or sufficient documentation unless a legitimate restriction prevents this.

7. Sensitive, Personal, Confidential, and Community-Governed Data

Authors must not make data publicly available when disclosure would violate participant consent, ethics approval, privacy, confidentiality, data-protection law, professional duties, court orders, security obligations, contractual restrictions, legitimate community governance, or another binding requirement.

Removing direct identifiers does not automatically make a dataset safe. Authors should consider indirect identifiers, rare characteristics, linked datasets, geographic detail, image or voice recognition, and other re-identification risks. The journal may request confirmation of ethics or institutional data-governance review.

8. Data Citation and Credit

Datasets and software used as evidence should be cited as research outputs, not mentioned only in the text. A data citation should include, where available, the creator or responsible organisation, dataset title, repository, publication year, version, persistent identifier, and access date when relevant.

Data creators and curators should receive appropriate scholarly credit, but data provision alone does not automatically qualify a person for article authorship. Authorship and contributorship remain governed by the journal's separate policy.

9. Data Licensing and Intellectual Property

Authors should apply a clear, appropriate licence or terms of use to data they are authorized to share. The licence should support legitimate reuse while reflecting participant consent, third-party rights, database rights, institutional ownership, funder requirements, community governance, and applicable law.

The Creative Commons licence applied to an MJ article does not automatically grant rights over third-party data, restricted data, software, images, databases, or other materials owned by another person or governed by separate terms. Authors must identify such exceptions clearly. Copyright ownership and article licensing are governed by the Copyright and Licensing Policy.

10. Editorial and Peer-Review Access

• Editors or reviewers may request data, code, instruments, permissions, documentation, analysis outputs, or other supporting material reasonably necessary to assess the manuscript.
• When public deposit is not possible, authors may be required to provide confidential editorial access through a secure and lawful method consistent with ethics and consent.
• Reviewers must treat non-public data as confidential, must not retain or reuse them, and must not upload them to unauthorized platforms or public generative-AI services.
• The journal may consult a data, statistical, computational, methodological, ethical, or subject specialist when the evidence requires additional expertise.
• Inability or refusal to provide supporting data without a credible reason may delay assessment, limit the claims that can be published, or result in rejection.

The review model, reviewer selection, confidentiality, reports, decisions, and timeframes remain governed by the Peer Review Policy.

11. Retention and Preservation

Authors and responsible institutions should retain the research data, documentation, approvals, consent records, analysis files, and provenance needed to support the article for at least five years after publication, or longer when required by law, ethics approval, funder, institution, contract, disciplinary standards, participant agreement, patent process, clinical rules, or an active investigation.

Repository deposit does not remove the authors' responsibility to preserve authoritative records and respond to legitimate questions. When a repository record is corrected, versioned, restricted, or withdrawn, its metadata and relationship to the article should remain transparent whenever legally and ethically possible.

12. Responsibilities of Authors and the Journal

13. Non-Compliance and Unavailable Data

If a statement is incomplete, inaccurate, misleading, or unsupported, the editor may request clarification, repository deposit, corrected metadata, documentation, controlled access, additional analysis, an appropriate limitation statement, or revision of claims. Editorial assessment may be paused until the matter is resolved.

Suspected fabrication, falsification, selective alteration, destruction, or misrepresentation of data is handled under the Plagiarism and Data Integrity Policy and Publication Ethics Policy. If supporting data become unavailable or unreliable after publication, the journal may require a corrected statement or another post-publication notice under the Article Retraction, Correction, and Removal Policy.

14. Appeals, Complaints, and Data-Access Disputes

An author, reader, participant, data custodian, or other affected person may raise a concern about a misleading availability statement, refusal to follow stated access conditions, inappropriate disclosure, privacy or consent risk, misuse of restricted data, or inconsistent application of this policy. The journal first determines whether the matter concerns data availability, research integrity, privacy, ethics, copyright, or another competent authority. Formal appeals and complaints follow the Appeals and Complaints Policy.

15. Relationship with Other Journal Policies

16. Contact and Data-Policy Questions

Questions should identify the manuscript title, OJS submission identification number or DOI, the data type, proposed repository or access route, relevant restriction, and any ethics, consent, licence, contract, or community-governance requirement. Submission-specific communication should use the confidential OJS discussion function where possible. General or post-publication questions may be submitted through the official journal contact page.