Data sharing policy

Data should be made publicly available in all circumstances, except when dissemination is precluded by well-justified ethical considerations. Commercial interests, contractual restrictions, or claims of private ownership do not constitute ethical grounds for withholding data.

By way of illustration of exceptions for ethical reason:

• The precise geographic coordinates of samples from endangered species may be withheld to prevent ecological harm.
• Human datasets containing personally identifiable information, or information that could reasonably enable the identification of individuals, must not be publicly disclosed for ethical and legal reasons.
• Manuscripts based on data owned by a private company or organisation that refuses public data sharing, in the absence of an ethical justification, are not eligible for submission.

Certain situations may fall into a grey area where ethical considerations are ambiguous; such cases should be discussed between the authors and the managing board of the PCI prior to submission.

When data cannot be shared, the authors must include a clear and explicit justification in the “Data, script and code availability” section of their article, detailing the ethical grounds for restricted access.

In all other cases (where ethical exceptions do not apply), raw data must be made available to reviewers and recommenders at the time of submission and to readers after recommendation. After recommendation, they must be available in the text or through a correctly versioned deposit in an open repository, such as Zenodo, Dryad, or an institutional repository (see Directory of Open Access Repositories) with a DOI or another permanent identifier (such as a SWHID of Software heritage). Note that Git URLs are not permanent. Information on how to issue a DOI for a GitHub repository is given at https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/archiving-a-github-repository/referencing-and-citing-content. Raw data must be carefully described such that another researcher can reuse them and reproduce the study’s results.