Note: This policy will be rolled out on Sept. 4, 2024, for new manuscripts submitted to Physical Review D and PRX Energy, and for all other Physical Review journals before the end of 2024. Manuscripts submitted to any journal before the policy has been implemented are strongly encouraged, but not required, to provide a Data Availability Statement and should follow these Guidelines for Data Availability Statements.
Physical Review D and PRX Energy will include a data availability statement in every published article to help readers access data when it is available.
Like all Physical Review journals, Physical Review D and PRX Energy strongly encourage authors to share their data. Sharing data supports the independent verification of findings, allows further analysis of valuable research data, and helps ensure transparency and trust in published literature. These are all key elements of open science, which is increasingly desired by research funders. Data should be publicly available at the time of publication where possible. However, embargoes on data sharing are permitted if necessary, such as to respect privacy or trade secrets.
If any data referred to in an article (including the authors’ original data) is publicly available at the time of publication, the authors will be asked to provide a reference or references giving further details, including a DOI or URL, which will be cited in the statement. Please see the section on data citation for more details.
If the data will not be made publicly available, then authors must:
The decision to accept an article for publication will not be affected by whether or not authors share their research data publicly, as long as both requirements above are met.
In addition to this policy, authors should follow requirements for sharing data and code set by their funding agencies and institutions.
Difficulty Assessing Data: If readers experience difficulty accessing data after publication that is out of line with the published data availability statement, they should contact APS’ editorial office. If editors cannot amicably address the issue, the journal may post a Correction or Editorial Expression of Concern to correct the previous data availability statement if it no longer reflects the availability of the data. Any concerns about the reliability of the research will be managed following our research integrity policies.
This policy applies to the research data that would be needed to verify or replicate the results of research reported in articles published in the Physical Review journals. It includes data produced by the authors and data from other sources that are analyzed in their study. Physical Review considers research data to be any recorded factual material used to produce the results, such as tabular data, code, software, graphs, images, audio, documents, video, raw, and/or processed data.
However, this policy does not apply to quantitative or qualitative data that could identify a research participant (“personal data”) unless participants have consented to data release, other sensitive data, or data that cannot legally be shared. Alternatives to publicly sharing sensitive or personal data include:
The preferred mechanism for sharing research data is via data repositories. Sharing research data via an established data repository makes data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (‘FAIR’). For further details see the sections below on data formats and standards.
Authors are encouraged to deposit their research data in a repository that has been widely adopted in their research community. If there are none or they are not available, authors may use a general data repository.
Examples of general data repositories include:
Further repositories can be found via the Registry of Research Data Repositories.
While papers published in Physical Review may have supplemental material files, authors should not use these files to share research data instead of a data repository. Supplemental material files do not receive a unique and citable identifier and are not aligned with the ‘FAIR’ principles. In addition, sharing research data in this way may not comply with the data policy of the funder or institution.
Physical Review strongly encourages authors to share research data using data formats and standards recognized by their research community. More information on established data-sharing formats and standards is available via FAIRsharing.
Authors should also share research data in open file formats — those that do not require proprietary software to access — where possible. For example, tabular data should be shared as CSV files rather than XLS files.
Authors are encouraged to make their research data available under open licenses that permit reuse freely, like CC0. However, Physical Review does not enforce particular licenses for research data, where research data are deposited in third-party repositories. APS copyright or licenses (such as CC-BY) on articles published in APS’ journals only apply to the journal articles and metadata, and not research data outside of the article.
We require authors to cite in the reference list any data referred to in their article, including their own, if it is publicly available. The reference should include the creators of the data, the year, any version number, the name of the repository if applicable, and a persistent identifier — preferably a DOI. If the data have a corresponding article published in a data journal, then the reference to the journal article should be included as well.
Data availability statements provide information on where the data supporting the results reported in the article can be found. Authors will be asked to select an appropriate data availability statement from a list of templates during the submission process. This statement will be automatically added to the published article as a separate paragraph after the Acknowledgments. Authors may make appropriate amendments to the statement at the proofing stage if the article is accepted for publication.
If the research data will be made publicly available, then reference(s) to the corresponding data set(s) will be cited in the data availability statement.
If the research data will not be publicly available, authors will also be asked to state the reason during the submission process and can select from several templates or enter a reason manually. Physical Review recognizes that there remain a range of barriers to the open sharing of all research data. The reason provided will not be grounds for rejecting the article.
If authors intend to make data openly available in the future but do not have a DOI/URL or a pre-registered DOI/URL when they submit their manuscript, they should state that data is not currently publicly available and then provide further details in the data availability statements section in the submission form on when and how the data will become accessible.
Here are some examples of data availability statements as they will appear in the published paper:
| Scenario | Examples of Data Availability Statements |
|---|---|
| All data publicly available | The data that support the findings of this article are openly available [1]
The data that support the findings of this article are openly available [1,2,3] |
| All data available after embargo | The data that support the findings of this article are openly available [1,3], embargo periods may apply. |
| No data publicly available, all of them unavailable for the same reason | The data that supports the findings of this article cannot be made publicly available because <reason>. The data are available upon reasonable request from the authors. |
| No data publicly available, different datasets unavailable for different reasons | A sentence for each unavailable reason consisting of <descriptions of each dataset> <reason>, followed by “The data are available upon reasonable request from the authors.” |
| Some data publicly available, some not | <some data available> followed by a sentence for each unavailable reason consisting of <descriptions of each dataset> <reason>, followed by “The data are available upon reasonable request from the authors.” |
| No data | No data were created or analyzed in this article. |