Data sharing policies in Brazilian Applied Social Sciences journals indexed in SciELO

ABSTRACT

Purpose of study:

Considering the growing importance of open science and the role of journals in disseminating its practices, this study aims to investigate and characterize the data-sharing editorial policies of Brazilian social science scholarly journals listed in the SciELO collection.

Methods:

This quantitative research performs a descriptive cross-sectional study of the data-sharing editorial policies of a sample of 47 Brazilian journals from Applied Social Sciences included in the SciELO collection in 2022. The method consists of the thematic content analysis of the editorial policies of the publications extracted from the electronic page of each publication in the sample. Eighteen variables are analyzed, 11 referring to the characteristics of the journals and seven related to the features of the policies.

Results:

The results show that 34% of the titles in the sample have some data sharing policy and, among these, 62.5% have optional policies; 68.7% indicate a repository for data deposit, especially SciELO Data and Zenodo. Where existent, the observed policies are often incomplete or silent regarding the types of data and formats accepted for sharing.

Conclusions:

The results align with those of the international empirical literature, which point to the lower frequency of data-sharing policies and the prevalence of optional policies in social science journals. New studies are needed to investigate better the correlations between attributes of Brazilian journals and characteristics of existing policies and to monitor the dissemination and maturation of editorial policies for these publications.

KEYWORDS:
Scholarly journals; Editorial policies; Open science; Data sharing; Social sciences