Nature Wants Your Replication Data

Have you replicated, or tried to replicate, a research study and want to share the data you generated with the scientific community? APS recognizes authors of published articles who make their data publicly available with an Open Data badge. But one journal is soliciting data from unpublished replication work, too.

Scientific Data, a journal of the Nature Publishing Group, has announced a call for submissions for replication data. Psychological scientists who have collected replication data on a study that has already been published in a peer-reviewed journal are invited to submit an article for consideration for this special collection.

“Submissions should describe in detail a dataset generated while attempting to replicate a previous study,” the call says. “In most cases, the study being replicated should have been previously published in a peer-reviewed journal. Authors may submit manuscripts describing in more detail replication datasets that were used in previous articles, or datasets that have not yet been reported.

Interested authors should submit a Data Descriptor manuscript, which is a special kind of data paper that includes details about how the data were collected and relevant usage notes. Editorial decisions will be based on the technical rigor of the procedures described by the manuscript, as well as the completeness of the reporting. Additionally, authors will be asked to post their data publicly on the Open Science Framework.

Submitting replication data to this special collection is a valuable way to contribute to improved transparency in psychological science, and helps alleviate potential “file-drawer” issues within the field. If authors are interested in other ways to help increase replicability in their own work, they can consult Psychological Science Interim Editor D. Stephen Lindsay’s 2015 editorial, “Replication in Psychological Science.”

Replication data manuscripts should be submitted to Scientific Data by July 1, 2016. Learn more by clicking here.