Ensuring data access, transparency, and preservation: mandatory data deposition for Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
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EDITORIAL
Ensuring data access, transparency, and preservation: mandatory data deposition for Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Theo C. M. Bakker 1
&
James F. A. Traniello 2
# The Author(s) 2020
Universal data sharing allows access to data sets supporting published research and enables the use of data for additional applications. It is important for quality control to ensure compliance with best practices for publication and scientific ethics and reliability of data storage. Data deposition in repositories is obligatory for publications involving molecular data (e.g., nucleotide sequence data, protein structural data) and for all data in publications in the life sciences and earth sciences in the highimpact journals Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B (see https://www.nature.com/sdata/ policies/repositories for recommended repositories for Nature). Data sharing allows the preservation and reuse of data when ethical (Duke and Porter 2013; Mills et al. 2015). Data not stored in a repository may be lost in the future: in a study of more than 500 papers containing morphological data, each annual increase in article age was found to decrease the odds of the data set remaining extant by 17% (Vines et al. 2013). Data sharing also facilitates the detection of irregularities or anomalies in raw data that may lead to corrections or retractions of published papers in behavioral ecology (e.g., Keiser et al. 2020; Laskowski et al. 2020a, b; Proceedings B Editorial Team 2020). Mandatory data sharing can thus strengthen journal credibility and stature and generally advance scientific interests (e.g., Piwowar and Vision 2013). Data upload, however, is uncommon in the publication of behavioral research (Caetano and Aisenberg
* Theo C. M. Bakker [email protected] 1
Institute for Evolutionary Biology and Ecology, University of Bonn, An der Immenburg 1, 53121 Bonn, Germany
2
Department of Biology, Boston University, 5 Cummington Mall, Boston, MA 02215, USA
2014). Mandatory requirements for making data available are increasing (Setchell et al. 2016; Sim et al. 2020). Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology will now require data deposition and strongly recommends to supplement source codes for publications in the journal to strengthen our policy of promoting the transparency and reproducibility of behavioral science by making data sets accessible (see Instructions for Authors for recommended repositories). This change in policy will ultimately benefit authors, as papers with publicly available datasets have higher citation rates than similar studies that do not post data (Piwowar and Vision 2013). Sharing long-term data may come with serious costs to the principal investigator; Mills et al. (2015) therefore suggest that “journals should have a rule that no paper is considered where the data users have not corresponded with the data owners and included appropriate acknowledgment of the source of the data within the paper.” Data for articles publi
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