The Journal of Heredity adopts the Joint Data Archiving Policy in full

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Our guest post today is from Mohamed Noor of Duke University, president of the American Genetic Association. The AGA is a scholarly society dating back to 1903.  AGA, together with Oxford University Press, publishes the Journal of Heredity, which is a charter member in the Dryad organization and one of the first journals to integrate manuscript and data submission with the repository.  The society just held their annual symposium in Durham, North Carolina, not so far from Dryad’s NESCent headquarters, and has some excellent news to report from the Council meeting.

The American Genetic Association is pleased to announce that it has now fully adopted the Joint Data Archiving Policy (JDAP) for the Journal of Heredity.  The Journal of Heredity had previously required that newly reported nucleotide or amino acid sequences, and structural coordinates, be submitted to appropriate public databases. For other forms of data, the Journal “endorsed the principles of the Joint Data Archiving Policy (JDAP) in encouraging all authors to archive primary datasets in an appropriate public archive, such as Dryad, TreeBASE, or the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity.”

This voluntary archiving policy was facilitated by the direct link between the Journal of Heredity and Dryad, in effect since February 2010.

To further support data-sharing and data access, in July 2012, the AGA Council voted unanimously to make data archiving a requirement for publication, under the terms specified in the JDAP.

The requirement will take effect by January 1, 2013. The American Genetic Association also recognizes the vast investment of individual researchers in generating and curating large datasets. Consequently, we recommend that this investment be respected in secondary analyses or meta-analyses in a gracious collaborative spirit.

Many other leading journals in ecology and evolutionary biology have adopted policies modeled on JDAP over the past two years, and other journals are invited to consider it as a policy that has attracted wide support among scientists.