Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy

Data Sharing & Accessibility Policy

Commercium: Journal of Business and Management supports responsible data sharing, research transparency, reproducibility, and FAIR data practices.

The journal encourages authors to make research data supporting their findings available whenever ethically, legally, contractually, and practically possible. Data sharing must respect participant privacy, confidentiality, intellectual property, organizational agreements, commercially sensitive information, and applicable laws and regulations.

1. Data Availability Statement

All research manuscripts must include a Data Availability Statement indicating whether supporting data are available, where they can be accessed, and any applicable conditions or restrictions. This may include survey data, interview materials, organizational datasets, market data, financial information, operational records, human resource data, or other evidence supporting the reported findings.

2. Data Repositories & Documentation

Where data can be shared, authors are encouraged to deposit them in a recognized disciplinary, general-purpose, or institutional repository that provides stable access and, preferably, a persistent identifier such as a DOI.

Appropriate repositories may include Zenodo, Figshare, Harvard Dataverse, Dryad, Open Science Framework (OSF), or a recognized institutional or disciplinary repository relevant to business, management, economics, organizational studies, or social-science research.

Where appropriate, authors should deposit supporting materials such as anonymized survey datasets, coding frameworks, interview protocols, questionnaires, statistical syntax, analytical scripts, supplementary tables, variable dictionaries, and documentation necessary to understand the analysis.

Data should be provided in appropriate, reusable, and preferably open or machine-readable formats, accompanied by sufficient metadata, variable descriptions, coding information, documentation, and methodological details to support interpretation, validation, and responsible reuse.

3. Ethical, Legal & Confidential Data

Data sharing must not compromise ethical obligations, participant confidentiality, employee or customer privacy, commercially sensitive information, intellectual property, proprietary organizational information, contractual commitments, or third-party agreements.

4. Data Citation & FAIR Principles

Shared datasets should be cited appropriately in the manuscript and reference list. Where available, authors should provide the dataset's creator(s), title, repository, year, version, and DOI or other persistent identifier.

FAIR does not necessarily mean that all business and management data must be completely open. Where access is restricted, authors should provide clear metadata and explain the ethical, legal, organizational, commercial, or contractual conditions under which access may be obtained.

5. Editorial Oversight

The Editorial Team may request access to supporting or underlying data when necessary to verify reported results, evaluate analytical consistency, investigate research-integrity concerns, or assess compliance with this policy. Where data contain confidential organizational or personal information, secure or appropriately controlled access may be requested instead of public disclosure.

Inaccurate or misleading data availability statements, unjustified refusal to provide data for legitimate editorial verification, fabricated or manipulated data, or serious inconsistencies between the article and underlying evidence may result in further editorial review and appropriate action under the journal's publication-ethics and post-publication policies.

This policy is informed by the COPE Core Practice on Data and Reproducibility, the COPE–DOAJ–OASPA–WAME Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, the FAIR Guiding Principles, and established international practices for responsible research-data management, transparency, reproducibility, and sharing in business and management research.