Announcement: New section – Data Availability Policies in Economic Journals

Posted: February 1st, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: journals | Tags: | 1 Comment »

Today, I want to introduce a new regular section here on edawax.de. Within the next weeks and months I’ m going to discuss some of the data availability policies we found during our investigations for our work package 2.

Even though you’ll find a lot of the information posted here in a condensed report by the end of spring, I thought it would be beneficial to our readers to get some preliminary information about the things we are currently doing. Of course I would be very happy to discuss the policies presented and some of my thoughts with you. So please feel free to comment or to send me an email.

When we are talking about the data availability policies and replication policies of scholarly economic journals, we have to keep in mind that the situation for sharing data and replicate results  isn’t very comfortable in economics:

“In economics, when one researcher wants to build on the work of another, he must recollect the same data, rewrite the same code, and largely duplicate the effort of those who have gone before him – this is not standing on the shoulders of one’s predecessors.“ (B. D. McCullough: Open Access Economics Journals and the Market for Reproducible Economic Research, In: Economic Analysis & Policy, Vol. 39, NO. 1, 2009, pp. 119f.)

In general, I agree with his statement – nevertheless there’s light and shadow in the field of economics.

For WP2 we build a sample of 153 Journals (we used the sample Bräuninger/ Haucap and Muck chose for their publication) and added 4 more journals that were not in the sample, but were investigated by B.D. McCullough and had a data policy at that time.

Later on we examined another sample of 42 Open-Access Journals publishing in English language. For this sample we chose Journals within the section “Economics” of the DOAJ.

In total we found 40 data availability policies and replication policies in our first sample. We consider a policy that requires authors to share data and code upon request as replication policy. A data availability policy, in contrast, is a policy where data and code would be archived prior to publication.

So I hope I could give you a brief conception of our current work and the new section. I am going to start this next week – beginning with one of the flagships of economic research and for data policies as well: The American Economic Review (AER).

picture: http://www.cyberseraphic. com/

 

 

One Comment on “Announcement: New section – Data Availability Policies in Economic Journals”

  1. 1 Minta said at 06:23 on February 13th, 2012:

    Unfortunately, I agree with this post. In gnareel, it seems that certain fields in science are using open access and others could take a lesson. Also missing from this is the discrepancy between the computer science field and ecoinformatics or bioinformatics in gnareel…where is the source code used for analysis that others can apply to their own data sets? I hope to incorporate my code and unique scripts for analysis into my project.