Data Sharing Policy

Medical Laboratory Journal (MLJ) uses the Basic Data Sharing Policy. The journal is committed to a more open research landscape, facilitating faster and more effective research discovery by enabling reproducibility and verification of data, methodology and reporting standards. Medical Laboratory Journal (MLJ)  encourages authors to cite and share their research data including, but not limited to: raw data, processed data, software, algorithms, protocols, methods, materials. Authors are encouraged to share or make open the data supporting the results or analyses presented in their article where this does not violate the protection of human subjects or other valid privacy or security concerns.

Medical Laboratory Journal (MLJ) encourages authors to share the data and other artifacts supporting the results in the article by archiving it in an appropriate public repository. Authors should include a Data Accessibility Statement, including a link to the repository they have used, in order that this statement can be published alongside their paper.

Medical Laboratory Journal (MLJ) requires authors of Original Investigation, Case Report, and Special Paper articles to (1) place the de-identified data associated with the manuscript in a repository; and (2) include a Data Availability Statement in the manuscript describing where and how the data can be accessed.

Medical Laboratory Journal (MLJ) defines data as the digital materials underlying the results described in the manuscript, including but not limited to spreadsheets, text files, interview recordings or transcripts, images, videos, output from statistical software, and computer code or scripts. Authors are expected to deposit at least the minimum amount of data needed to reproduce the results described in the manuscript.

Data can be placed in any repository that makes data publicly available and provides a unique persistent identifier, including institutional repositories, general repositories (e.g., Figshare, Open Science Framework, Zenodo, Dryad, Harvard Dataverse, OpenICPSR), or discipline-specific repositories.

The Data Availability Statement should be placed in the manuscript at the end of the main text before the references. This statement must include (1) an indication of the location of the data; (2) a unique identifier, such as a digital object identifier (DOI), accession number, or persistent uniform resource locator (URL); and (3) any instructions for accessing the data, if applicable.

At the point of submission, you will be asked if there is a data set associated with the paper. If you reply yes, you will be asked to provide the DOI, pre-registered DOI, hyperlink, or other persistent identifier associated with the data set(s). If you have selected to provide a pre-registered DOI, please be prepared to share the reviewer URL associated with your data deposit, upon request by reviewers.

Where one or multiple data sets are associated with a manuscript, these are not formally peer reviewed as a part of the journal submission process. It is the author’s responsibility to ensure the soundness of data. Any errors in the data rest solely with the producers of the data set(s).

Please note: As you are submitting your manuscript to Medical Laboratory Journal (MLJ)  where submissions are double-blind peer reviewed, the main text file should not include any information that might identify the authors (i.e., Author Name, Address, Conflict of Interest and fund related information). As a data availability statement could reveal your identity, we recommend that you remove this from the anonymized version of the manuscript.

Exceptions to this policy will be made in rare cases in which de-identified data cannot be shared due to their proprietary nature or participant privacy concerns. Exceptions to policy and restrictions on data availability are granted for reasons associated with the protection of human privacy, issues such as biosafety, and/or to respect terms of use for data obtained under license from third parties. Confidential data, e.g., human subject or patient data, should always be anonymized, or permission to share should be obtained in advance. If in doubt, authors should seek counsel from their institution’s ethics committee.

Authors should include a data accessibility statement, including a link to the repository they have used, in order that this statement can be published alongside their paper. Below a few examples:

Data Availability Statement:

1. Data associated with this article are available in the Open Science Framework at .

2. The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in [repository name] at http://doi.org/[doi], reference number [reference number].

3. The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in [repository name] at [URL], reference number [reference number].

4. The data that support the findings of this study are available in [repository name] at [URL/DOI], reference number [reference number]. These data were derived from the following resources available in the public domain: [list resources and URLs]

Benefits of Sharing Data:

There are several benefits to sharing data:

• Data deposition supports the preservation of data long term.
• Depositing data in a repository that mints a permanent identifier such as a DOI, allows authors and others to cite the data set, allowing researchers to get appropriate credit for their work.
• Sharing data can lead to re-use and discovery, with greater opportunities for carrying out meta-analyses and the extraction of new knowledge.
• Sharing data publicly improves the robustness of the research process, supporting validation, research transparency, reproducibility and replicability of results. This can in turn, advance discovery and knowledge.
• Wider public availability of research data supports the translation of research into practice.

Medical Laboratory Journal (MLJ) offers the following standardized data sharing policies across our journal:

• Basic – Journal encourages authors to share and make data open where this does not violate protection of human subjects or other valid subject privacy concerns. Authors are further encouraged to cite data and provide a data availability statement.
• Share upon reasonable request – Authors agree to make their data available upon reasonable request. It’s up to the author to determine whether a request is reasonable.
• Publicly available – Authors make their data freely available to the public, under a license of their choice.
• Open data – Authors must make their data freely available to the public, under a license allowing re-use by any third party for any lawful purpose. Data shall be findable and fully accessible.
• Open and fully FAIR (Findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable) – Authors must make their data freely available to the public, under a license allowing re-use by any third party for any lawful purpose. Additionally, data shall meet with FAIR standards as established in the relevant subject area.

Data Citation

Data should be cited in the same way as article, book, and web citations and authors are required to include data citations as part of their reference list. Data citation is appropriate for data held within institutional, subject focused, or more general data repositories. It is not intended to take the place of community standards such as in-line citation of GenBank accession codes.
When citing or making claims based on data, authors must refer to the data at the relevant place in the manuscript text and in addition provide a formal citation in the reference list. Medical Laboratory Journal (MLJ) follows the format proposed by the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles:

Authors; Year; Dataset title; Data repository or archive; Version (if any); Persistent identifier (e.g. DOI)”.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).