ASA Journal Policies on Data Sharing and Reproducibility

In January, ASA Executive Director Ron Wasserstein published a blog post on the ASA’s community site regarding the policies of the ASA’s journals with respect to data sharing and reproducibility.

The American Statistical Association strongly encourages authors to include as supplementary material data sets and code that demonstrate the results shown in their final article. ASA journal editors may set their own policies based on this broad principle, and authors may request a waiver for reasons of confidentiality or security.

Beginning in 2018, the ASA’s publishing partner, Taylor & Francis, is also introducing a basic data-sharing policy across all its journal titles. This policy will encourage authors to share and make the data underlying their published article publicly available when it does not violate protection of human subjects or other valid subject privacy concerns.

Authors will be further encouraged to cite any data referenced in their paper. Whether this has been created by the author or someone else, cited data sets should be included in the reference list. Finally, authors will be encouraged to include a data availability statement.

Data-sharing policies will be set at the journal level in consultation with editors and relevant societies or other stakeholders during 2018.

Please visit the blog post to read more. ASA Journals Manager Eric Sampson and Wasserstein encourage comments and questions.