Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy

Research Transparency & Reproducibility

Data Sharing & Accessibility Policy

Sustainability in Human Resources supports responsible data sharing, research transparency, reproducibility, and FAIR data practices.

TRANSPARENCY REPRODUCIBILITY FAIR DATA

The journal encourages authors to make research data supporting their findings available whenever ethically, legally, contractually, and practically possible. Data sharing must respect employee privacy, participant confidentiality, organizational sensitivity, intellectual property, employment agreements, commercial considerations, and applicable laws and ethical requirements.

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. Relevant data may include employee surveys, interviews, workforce analytics, organizational records, human resource metrics, well-being indicators, sustainability measures, workplace observations, or other evidence supporting the reported findings.

Public Repository
The data supporting the findings of this study are available in [repository name] at [DOI/persistent identifier].
Available on Request
The data supporting the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Included in the Article
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article and its supplementary materials.
Restricted Data
The data are not publicly available due to privacy, ethical, legal, employment, organizational, commercial, contractual, or third-party 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 relevant to human resource management, organizational behavior, sustainability, management, or social-science research.

Where appropriate, supporting materials may include anonymized employee or participant datasets, survey instruments, interview guides, coding frameworks, statistical syntax, analytical scripts, variable dictionaries, sustainability indicators, workforce metrics, and supplementary tables.

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, verification, replication, and responsible reuse.

3. Ethical, Legal & Confidential Data

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

✓ De-identify or aggregate employee, applicant, manager, participant, and organizational data where appropriate. ✓ Respect informed consent, ethical approval, and agreed conditions for workforce-data use.
✓ Explain legal, contractual, employment, organizational, or commercial restrictions. ✓ State clearly how restricted data may be accessed, where ethically and legally possible.
Important: Authors are not required to make data publicly available when doing so would violate ethical, legal, privacy, confidentiality, employment, intellectual-property, contractual, commercial, organizational, or third-party obligations.

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.

F
Findable		 A
Accessible		 I
Interoperable		 R
Reusable

FAIR does not necessarily mean that all human resource or organizational data must be completely open. Where access is restricted, authors should provide clear metadata and explain the ethical, legal, employment, 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 employee, participant, or organizational 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 workforce 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.

Policy Alignment

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, employee-data protection, and sharing in human resource and organizational research.