Data access statements, also known as data availability statements, are used in publications to describe where the data or research materials directly supporting the publication can be found and under what conditions they can be accessed. They are typically found at the end of research articles, alongside or included in the acknowledgements section.
Data access statements are required for all publications arising from publicly-funded research, and a simple direction to ‘contact the author’ is not normally considered sufficient.
The purpose of the data access statement is transparency and discoverability – the data referenced by the statement do not have to be openly available. There are many reasons why access to data should be restricted and if you are unsure about whether you should publish your data openly please contact [email protected] for advice.
On this page, you’ll find guidance on what to include in your data access statements and how to cite existing data, and you’ll find example data access statements for a range of research scenarios.
What to include in the data access statement
Data access statements should include:
- A persistent identifier, such as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which links directly to the data or to a metadata record that describes the data in detail
- A statement describing how the research data or research materials may be accessed and any legal, ethical, or commercial constraints that may apply
For example:
- If data are openly available the name(s) of the data repositories should be provided, as well as any persistent identifiers or accession numbers for the dataset, and the licence under which the data has been made available
- If there are justifiable legal or ethical reasons why your data cannot be made available, these should be included in the data access statement.
- If the data themselves are not openly available, the data access statement should direct users to a permanent record that describes any access constraints or conditions that must be satisfied for access to be granted.
- If you did not collect the research data yourself but instead used existing data obtained from another source, this source should be credited.
Example data access statements
(Please note that to prevent creating bias in metrics monitoring DOI resolutions, the URLs used in these examples are not genuine.)
Depending on the nature of your data you may wish to combine information from different examples.
Citing existing data
If you have used pre-existing third party data in your research, you must acknowledge and cite this work as you would a journal article:
- "Surname, I., and Surname, I. 2015. Title of dataset. Name of repository. Available from: http://doi.org/10. 15125/12345 [Accessed 1 March 2018]."
- "This study was a re-analysis of existing data that are publicly available from EMBL at http://doi.org/10.15125/12345. Further documentation about data processing are available from the University of Bath data archive at http://doi.org/10.15125/12345."
- "The study brought together existing data obtained upon request and subject to licence restrictions from a number of different sources. Full details how these data were obtained are available in the documentation available at http://doi.org/10.15125/12345."
You can find more guidance on how to cite datasets from the Digital Curation Centre, and you can use the DOI Citation Formatter from CrossCite to generate a citation from a DOI that conforms with a wide range of style guides.
Non-digital data
You should consider digitising non-digital research materials for preservation if possible, in which case you can cite your materials as digital datasets. If this is not possible, you can still create a data output record for your non-digital data in the VRE, with a corresponding DOI, that can be shared in your data access statement. In this case, include the DOI and the location of the non-digital data in your statement:
- "Non-digital data supporting this study are stored by the corresponding author at the University of Westminster. Details of how to access these data are provided in the documentation available at the University of Westminster Research Data Repository at [insert DOI here]."
Openly available data
- "All data created during this research are openly available from [add in appropriate data archive eg Figshare] at http://doi.org/10.15125/12345."
- "All data supporting this study are provided as supplementary information accompanying this paper."
- "All data are provided in full in the results section of this paper." "Expression data are openly available from ArrayExpress (Accession E-MTAB-01234 at https://www.ebi.ac.uk/arrayexpress/experiments/E-MTAB-01234/). Crystal structures are available from the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (Identifier BATHRS) at http://doi.org/10.15125/010203. Microscopy images are openly available from Dryad at http://doi.org/10.15125/01234."
Restricted data
Access to data may be restricted if it contains personally, commercially, or politically sensitive data.
- "Anonymised interview transcripts from participants who consented to data sharing, plus other supporting information, are available from the UK Data Service, subject to registration, at http://doi.org/10.15125/12345."
- "Due to ethical concerns, supporting data cannot be made openly available. Further information about the data and conditions for access are available at the: http://doi.org/10.15125/12345."
- "Due to the (commercially, politically, ethically) sensitive nature of the research, no interviewees consented to their data being retained or shared. Additional details relating to other aspects of the data are available from the metadata record at http://doi.org/10.15125/12345."
We acknowledge the work of the University of Bath and the University of Manchester in the development of this guidance.
Contact us
For further guidance and support, contact the research data management officer at [email protected].