Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy

Data Sharing & Accessibility Policy

Communica: Journal of Communication 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, and practically possible. This may include survey data, interview data, coded qualitative materials, media datasets, social-media datasets, content-analysis data, audience data, communication metrics, transcripts, codebooks, research instruments, and other materials supporting the published findings. Data sharing must respect participant privacy, confidentiality, informed consent, intellectual property, platform terms, contractual obligations, and applicable laws.

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.

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 suitable for communication, media, social-science, or interdisciplinary research data.

Communication research data should be accompanied by sufficient documentation to allow readers to understand how the data were collected, organized, coded, analyzed, and interpreted. Where relevant, authors should provide codebooks, coding schemes, variable definitions, survey instruments, interview guides, analytical scripts, data dictionaries, and methodological notes.

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

3. Ethical, Legal & Confidential Data

Data sharing must not compromise ethical obligations, participant confidentiality, personal information, informed consent, copyrighted media content, platform restrictions, confidential communications, commercially sensitive information, intellectual property, 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 data must be completely open. Where access is restricted, authors should provide clear metadata and explain the conditions under which access may be obtained. Communication datasets involving copyrighted media, private digital content, confidential interviews, or sensitive participants may require controlled or restricted access.

5. Editorial Oversight

The Editorial Team may request access to supporting or underlying data when necessary to verify reported results, assess methodological consistency, investigate research-integrity concerns, or evaluate compliance with this policy.

For communication research, this may include requests for anonymized datasets, coding frameworks, codebooks, survey instruments, interview protocols, analytical scripts, statistical outputs, content-analysis records, or other supporting materials relevant to the reported findings.

Inaccurate or misleading data availability statements, unjustified refusal to provide data for confidential editorial verification, or serious inconsistencies between the article and underlying data 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 research-data sharing practices.