[From the article, “The Landscape of Open Data Policies” by David Mellor, published at the Center for Open Science blogsite]

“TOP [Transparency and Openness Promotion] includes eight policies for publishers or funders to use to increase transparency. They include data transparency, materials and code transparency, design and citation standards, preregistration, and replication policies. For simplicity, this post will focus just on the Data Transparency policy. TOP can be implemented in one of three levels of increasing rigor:”

– “Level 1, Disclosure. Articles must state whether or not data underlying reported results are available and, if so, how to access them.”

– “Level 2, Mandate. Article must share data underlying reported results in a trusted repository. If data cannot be shared for ethical or legal constraints, authors must state this and provide as much data as can be reasonably shared.”

– “Level 3, Verify that shared data are reproducible. Shared data must be made available to a third party to verify that they can be used to replicate findings reported in the article.”

“Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley have all recently adopted tiered data sharing policies that make improvements in supporting transparency easier for the journals that they publish. Each shares some characteristics and rely on similar tiers: from encouragement to share data to increasingly strong mandates to do so.”