A new data archiving policy for <i>Biotropica</i>

Abstract

Recent years have seen an upsurge in the value placed by the scientific community on archiving in permanent repositories the data that serve as the foundation of published articles. Many reasons have been put forward for why archiving data are valuable (Bruna 2010, Whitlock et al. 2010, Wenburg 2011), with some of the most compelling including: In the light of these important benefits to the scientific community, the Editorial Board of Biotropica has voted to implement the Data Archiving Policy described below for all manuscripts submitted after January 1, 2016. This policy is an important and exciting step forward for Biotropica. We join an elite group of journals in our field that mandate data archiving, including The American Naturalist, Oikos, and the journals of the British Ecological Society, but in a way that meets the needs of our unique community of authors. First, our policy includes a generous embargo period of up to 3 yr to ensure authors have ample time to publish multiple papers from more complex or long-term datasets. Second, our policy includes something unique—language explicitly encouraging ‘Data Users’ to engage intellectually in true collaboration with ‘Data Generators’. Finally, the non-profit and NSF-supported Data Dryad (http://datadryad.org/) was designed with ecological and evolutionary data in mind, is easily integrated with our publisher's manuscript submission system, and is the repository of choice for many journals in environmental biology. While authors are free to archive in any repository that ensures data will be permanently archived, Biotropica will provide partial or complete waivers to offset the costs of archiving in Dryad to authors that cannot afford to do so. In closing we would like to thank the Editorial Board for its bold action in developing and implementing this policy, and we hope you will agree it is an important step in the right direction for Biotropica, our authors, and the advancement of tropical biology. Biotropica Data Archiving Policy (Effective 1 January 2016): Biotropica requires, as a condition for publication, that the data supporting the results in the paper and metadata describing them must be archived in an appropriate public archive such as Dryad (http://datadryad.org), Figshare (http://figshare.com), GenBank (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/), TreeBASE (http://www.treebase.org), or NCBI (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra). Authors may elect to make the data publicly available as soon as the article is published or, if the technology of the archive allows, embargo access to the data up to 3 yr after article publication. A statement describing Data Availability will be included in the manuscript as described in the instructions to authors. Exceptions to the required archiving of data may be granted at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief for studies that include sensitive information (e.g., the location of endangered species). Our Editorial explaining the motivation for this policy can be read at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-7429.2010.00652.x/abstract. A more comprehensive list of data repositories in which data can be archived is available at http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Data_repositories. Promoting a culture of collaboration with researchers who collect and archive data: The data collected by tropical biologists are often long-term, complex, and expensive to collect. The Board of Editors of Biotropica strongly encourages authors who reuse archived datasets to include as fully engaged collaborators the scientists who originally collected them. We feel this will greatly enhance the quality and impact of the resulting research by drawing on the data collector's profound insights into the natural history of the study system, reducing the risk of errors in novel analyses, and stimulating the cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration and training for which the ATBC and Biotropica are widely recognized.