New data archiving policy for the Royal Entomological Society and partnership with Dryad.
In recent years all Royal Entomological Society (RES) journals have included a Data Availability Statement as standard. This statement is intended to improve reproducibility and robustness of published articles. Making data openly available allows results to be checked and improves the quality of published articles, particularly if data are available during peer review. Data availability can also reduce duplication of effort and allow for robust secondary analyses, including evidence synthesis and meta-analysis. Papers with available data are more likely to be cited. The argument that data collected using public funds should be publicly available is also compelling.
Unfortunately, we have found that the vast majority of Data Availability Statements in RES journals state that ‘Data are available on request’. This is better than no statement, but clearly is not optimal for reproducibility. The FAIR principles provide well established guidelines for making data openly available and there has been much written on how researchers can practically adhere to these guidelines within each discipline, e.g., Jenkins et al. for Ecology and Evolution. Ultimately, improving the openness of data published in RES journals will improve the quality and usefulness of the work we publish and supports the vision of the Society to ‘enrich the world with insect science’.
The Royal Entomological Society are therefore pleased to announce that going forward all of the RES journals will mandate that data be published online concurrent with publication of the journal article. Moreover, authors are required to make data available to editors and reviewers when submitting the first revision of their article to the journal. Unless authors choose to do so, data do not need to be publicly available at revision stage. Many repositories, including Dryad, offer a “private for peer review option” which makes this easy.
The policy is available to read here: RES Journals: Data Archiving Policy (wiley.com)
The Royal Entomological Society encourages authors to archive data in whichever repository is most appropriate for their data. However, we recommend (but do not require) use of Dryad. We have partnered with Dryad to ensure authors are able to deposit their data easily after manuscript submission. More importantly, since we feel strongly that open data are important for the entomological community, we cover the cost of archiving data with Dryad with no further cost to our author/s.
“Open data, and open science principles more broadly are important for improving the quality and usability of entomological research. We are delighted to be announcing this update to our data archiving policy which aligns with our strategic aim to ‘Support the study and practice of insect science’.
We also feel it is important to provide clear financial and logistical support to our authors in adhering to this new policy, by covering the cost of archiving in dryad, and we are equally delighted to announce this partnership.”
Emilie Aimé, Director of Publishing at the Royal Entomological Society
“We are truly honoured to partner with the Royal Entomological Society in supporting the entomological community to transition to a world where open science and open data become the norm. We look forward to collaborating closely with the Society and the researchers they serve to ensure that research data in entomology is rigorously described and discoverable to fully enable author recognition, credit and reuse.”
Maria Guerreiro, Head of Partnership Development at Dryad
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