Assessment of Journal Requirements and Needs. CESSDA Work Plan 2020.

Journals Outreach is a sub-task of the CESSDA Work Plan 2020 Task Widening Activities and Journals Outreach. The specific objective of this deliverable is to provide a better understanding of journal practices, requirements, and needs regarding the accessibility of data used in scientific publications. To this effect, a combination of secondary analysis from the policies of 3 global publishing companies and primary data analysis from 7 interviews with journal editors was conducted and is presented here. In general, the global publishers are applying blanket policies from physical sciences to social sciences, without explicit consideration for the sensitivity of social science data (e.g. qualitative data, importance of metadata, contextual information on the studies). The majority of the editors interviewed are positively predisposed towards data sharing and replication and have already implemented or are in the process of revising/implementing policies in this direction. This report highlights an opportunity for national DSPs and CESSDA as a whole to learn from some of the policies implemented by the global publishing companies (innovation, simplicity and clarity), with a focus on supporting the independent journals and national publishers to develop policies appropriate for the needs of social science research towards data sharing.