Data sharing is widely accepted to be a key factor when working towards a reproducible and transparent science. In order to find out whether journals have successfully implemented data sharing policies and requirements, Vasilevsky N.A. et al., recently presented an interesting revision of such sharing characteristics for 318 biomedical journals.

All the journals under study were analysed and classified depending on qualitative criteria: data sharing required for all data types, only required for omics data, recommended, or not addressed. Other elements such as publishing volume or model, and Journal Impact Factor (IF) were taken into account for each journal, as well.
The results extracted from this work are far from ideal: whilst 11.9% of journals explicitly mentioned data sharing to be mandatory for publication, 31.8% do not mention such requirements, not even encourage the authors, at all.
Nevertheless, IF were interestingly higher for journals with the strongest data sharing policies, implying a significant association between the impact of the publication and the access to the data.

The article described was published in PeerJ on November 12th, 2016.