A FAIR share

As sharing of research data becomes more important, we are facilitating this by integrating the Figshare repository into our submission system.

One approach to increasing transparency and reproducibility in science is to make all underlying data open to anyone who would like to inspect or use it. This would have been next to impossible before the advent of cheap digital storage media, but the steady march of technological progress now makes this goal achievable for many disciplines.

Credit: laboratory / Alamy Stock Photo

In an effort to encourage our authors to share their data in a way that can benefit their community and be available during peer review, Nature Physics (along with many other Nature Portfolio journals) is partnering with the data sharing service Figshare (https://www.figshare.com). Now, when our authors submit a paper either for the first time or as a resubmission, they have the option to also upload up to 50 GB of supporting data and code free of charge.

This data and code will be private until the peer review process is complete, but upon publication of the paper they will be given a DOI, become publicly available under an open license, and will be linked directly from the paper. Authors will retain all rights to their data.

Peer reviewers will be able to anonymously access the private data during the review process via a link provided as part of the manuscript materials in our submission system.

Further details for authors can be found on the Springer Nature website: https://www.springernature.com/gp/authors/research-data/figshare-integration.

Sharing data using our Figshare partnership is completely optional. If authors are mandated to share data via other routes (for example by the facility where the data was taken) then there is no need to duplicate by using Figshare as well. Our hope is that providing this service will lower the barrier by making the process easier for authors who do not currently routinely share large amounts of data, and it is not intended as a replacement for other sharing solutions that authors already use.

This initiative is also not meant to replace the sharing of source data — the specific data shown in the figures of the paper — but to complement it by facilitating the sharing of wider sets of underlying data. We will continue to encourage authors of accepted papers to upload source data with their final submission in the same way that we have in the past.