Medical Data Sharing: Improving Journal Policy Guidance 

SUMMARY

Increasingly funders, institutions and publishers are requiring authors to share data linked to their articles. To facilitate this many publishers have created data sharing policies to guide authors on the minimum requirements for sharing in a specific journal. However, often these policies are very general in their examples of data types and suggested repositories. This has been effective for illustrating best practice for many authors but not all. Where policies are unclear or inconsistent, this can create barriers to participation and compliance. 

A survey of pharmaceutical companies conducted by Open Pharma in 2023 found that data sharing policies of medical journals were not fit for purpose, with the majority of companies reporting that they did not have enough specific information to understand journal requirements when preparing their submissions.  

This lack of clarity can create inequities in the research system, where researchers or organisations with more policy expertise or resources are better able to interpret requirements than others.  

Colleagues from Taylor & Francis were part of the Open Pharma working group and took the findings to STM to propose a working group to tackle this problem and specifically create data sharing guidance aimed at medical and health sciences research. 

This resulted in a new set of guidance aimed at journal publishers, based on the RDA data sharing policy framework.  This guide is designed to improve clarity, transparency and usability of journal policies giving publishers key information and questions to help them update their journal policies and author instructions.

WHAT ACTIONS WERE TAKEN?

• To create the guidance, workshops were held with a range of publishers (T&F, Wiley, Science, Elsevier, BMJ, OUP and PLOS) to understand their current policy provision and questions they receive from journal editors and authors.
• Additional workshops were held with representatives from pharma companies (GSK, Novartis, Gilead, Alpha Sigma, as well as Open Pharma and Pistoia Alliance) to understand the specifics of their challenges and to elaborate on the results of the earlier survey.
• A small group of publishers then took the workshop outputs to create the new guidance document. This was an iterative process, experimenting with different formats and structures, with feedback from experts.
• Ultimately, a guidance document for publishers was created rather than a new data sharing policy. The work was inspired by RDA data policy structure as an organising principle.

This approach ensured the guidance built on existing international frameworks and focused on improving the clarity and accessibility of data sharing policies. Importantly, key stakeholders fed into the process and built on existing work in this area – avoiding creating another new standard or structure in this space.