BioMed Central, publisher of over 200 peer-reviewed journals, has issued a draft statement on data sharing and open data, inviting comments from the scientific community.  BMC’s Iain Hrynaszkiewicz consulted with several Dryad team members in the formulation of the statement.  A related editorial in BMC Research Notes names Dryad as an example of a repository where data are assigned a unique identifier and “available in perpetuity with permanence guaranteed.”  BMC Research Notes is seeking to encourage greater data sharing by waiving the publication fee for all articles which use or link to open data that is prepared in line with a community-accepted standard.

The draft statement supports data deposition in repositories assigning permanent identifiers to data, such as the DOI used by Dryad.    BMC endorses the publishers’ role of providing “clear and permanent links to data hosted in repositories” and are working on a list of the available repositories.

Furthermore the statement says  that “a way forward would be to require that from a specific date, any author submitting to a BioMed Central journal agrees to dedicate the data elements of their article and supplementary material to the public domain and apply the CC0 licence.” This proposed policy aligns closely with the Joint Data Archiving Policy (JDAP) already adopted by several Dryad partner journals.

Comments on the statement can be directed to the BMC blog.