You may have noticed that funding bodies and universities increasingly require you to share your research data at the end of your project.  This often coincides with the time when you publish papers about your research.  Therefore, journals are looking for ways to make it easier to you to share your data and comply with funder mandates. Mendeley Data can help with that.

Elsevier announced earlier this month that they are now implementing journal data guidelines for all their journals. This means that all journals will clearly explain whether you are expected to make your data available. More importantly, this means that all journals now provide the right infrastructure for data sharing.

For most journals this means that they will provide three options. First, it is possible to link to your data in a domain-specific data repository. Domain-specific repositories are often the best place for your data because they can ask for the information that is relevant in your field. However, in cases where there is no good domain-specific repository available, these journals enable you to share your data through Mendeley Data.

When you upload your data to Mendeley Data during the article submission process, a draft of your data will become available. Only you, the editor, and the reviewers have access to this draft. This gives editors and reviewers the opportunity to take a look and provide feedback. You can then still make changes to improve your dataset. By default, your dataset will only become publicly available when your article is published. If you want to analyze your data further before sharing with the world, you can also set an embargo data so that the dataset will become available at a later time.

In cases where you cannot share your data at all, you will have the option to make a data statement, explaining why your data is unavailable. Should you wish to make your data available at a later point in time, just go to data.mendeley.com and indicate that this dataset is linked to an article. We will make sure your article links back to your dataset to ensure it gets the attention it deserves.