Trends in PLoS Data Availability Statements of Articles with Qualitative Data (2015–2023)

Derek Robey, Dessi Kirilova

Over the past decade, many scholarly journals have adopted policies on data sharing, with an increasing number of journals requiring that authors share the data underlying their published work. Frequently, qualitative data are excluded from those policies explicitly or implicitly. A few journals, however, intentionally do not make such a distinction. This project focuses on articles published in eight of the open-access journals maintained by Public Library of Science (PLoS). All PLoS journals introduced strict data sharing expectations in 2014, applying to all empirical data on the basis of which articles are published. Using over 2,300 articles containing a qualitative data component published between 2015 and 2023 (most of which appeared in PLoS One), we explore the types of statements researchers made regarding the availability or lack thereof of their data. We explore the degree to which and manner in which data were made available (for example, in repositories, via institutional gate-keepers, or on request from author; minimal dataset vs full collection) versus those that are declared not available at all, as well as longitudinal shifts in the specific restrictions and access requirements that researchers who work with human participant data apply to their source materials. Based on the results, we also issue some recommendations to both researchers on how to make their data availability statements clearer, more transparent and more informative, and to journal editors and reviewers, on how to interpret and evaluate statements to ensure they accurately reflect a given data availability scenario. Finally, we suggest a workflow which can link interactions with repositories most productively as part of a typical editorial process.