Open Access Science Publisher Demands Full Availability Of Data

If you publish in PLoS, be prepared to share all the underlying data.

Yesterday, the open access publisher Public Library of Science announced a change to its data sharing requirements. Previously, anyone publishing in one of its journals (including PLoS One, the largest scientific journal around) implicitly agreed to make the data that they used in the paper available to other researchers, which typically meant that the other researchers had to make a formal request for it. From now on, however, the PLoS journals will require authors to sign a data availability statement that guarantees that all the data used in a paper is publicly accessible to anyone at the moment the paper goes live.