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Publishing Research Data Alongside Research Articles

Published: 24.10.2025

In the recent years, it has become increasingly common for scientific journals to encourage or require the publication of underlying data, code, and methods that support the scientific results presented in articles. Publishing data and code is essential for ensuring the credibility of scientific results and facilitating reproducibility

Several international publishers have established data policies, for example, Elsevier's Research Data Policy and Springer Nature's Research Data Policy. A critical aspect of these policies is the Data Availability Statement (DAS), which includes information on what data are available, where they can be found, and any applicable access terms.

There are several options for sharing data, with the most common being:

Data provided as supplementary material.
Data stored in a trustworthy repository with a persistent identifier.
Data not shared openly but available upon reasonable request.

The expectation is that there will be a surge in open research data linked to publications, as both funders and major publishers require it. However, research indicates that, for example, less than half of the journals publishing ecological and evolutionary research have a mandated data- or code-sharing policy, with even fewer requiring authors to share data during peer review. Journals appear to have a significant role in increasing data and code availability through their policies (Ivimey-Cook et al., 2025).

A study conducted at the University of Tampere on the use of data availability statements of peer-reviewed scientific articles (published in 2020 – 2021) revealed that approximately 25% of articles included a DAS. Openly accessible articles tend to have more DAS statements and open data than paywalled articles. Besides archives, data is often stored alongside the article. Many researchers store data themselves and promise to share it upon "reasonable request." (Toikko and Kylmälä, 2023).

Glerean (2025) discusses a few common reasons researchers give for not openly sharing data:

Privacy, ethics, safety: These blockers are often mentioned being out of researchers' control, such as ethics committee restrictions.
Losing competitive advantage/being scooped: Researchers may avoid publishing data because they are still analyzing it.
Data ownership: While researchers may control data, it's typically owned by their research organization.
Data size and storage cost: Storing datasets indefinitely involves costs.
Data preparation efforts (technical, legal, ethical): Opening and managing datasets requires substantial work by experts.

These barriers commonly result in the statement "data available on reasonable request."

According to Glerean (2025), data appraisal should become an essential element explicitly discussed during the planning stage of research. Unique data with high reusability and potential policy impact should always be made open while data that are very difficult or costly to open should be possible to keep local.

Glearean, E. (2025) Data available on unreasonable request. Blockers in data opening and possible solutions. Unpublished presentation. Glerean_2025_Data_available_on_unreasonable_request.pdf - Google Drive
Ivimey-Cook E.,R. et al. (2025) From policy to practice: progress towards data- and code-sharing in ecology and evolution. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 292 (2055) https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2025.1394
Toikko, T., & Kylmälä, K. (2023). Tutkimusdatan saatavuustiedot tieteellisissä artikkeleissa: Raportti Data Availability Statementien käytöstä Tampereen yliopistossa. Informaatiotutkimus, 42(1-2), 31–50. https://doi.org/10.23978/inf.126098

This article was inspired by presentations at an event organized by Open Science Coordination titled "Publishing Data in Connection with a Research Article." More details about the program and presented material can be found at Vertaistukitilaisuus: datan julkaiseminen tutkimusartikkelien yhteydessä.