Open Data and FAIR Data Policy

 

The journal “Political Science and Security Studies Journal” supports the principles of Open Science and adheres to the FAIR Data standards: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. The purpose of this policy is to enhance the transparency, reliability, and reproducibility of published research.

Key principle: authors must ensure appropriate access to research data unless restricted by ethical, legal, or security considerations.

1. General Provisions

This policy applies to manuscripts reporting empirical, experimental, computational, or applied research. It defines requirements for data sharing, description, citation, and long-term preservation.

2. Research Data Policy

Authors submitting manuscripts based on empirical or computational research must ensure access to the datasets used or generated during the study.

Data should be deposited in an open, national, international, or institutional repository that supports persistent identifiers, such as DOI, Handle, or ARK.

Authors are encouraged to specify open-access licenses such as CC BY or CC0.

If open access to data is not possible due to ethical, legal, confidentiality, intellectual property, or security reasons, authors must clearly justify this in the manuscript.

3. Data Availability Statement

All manuscripts based on empirical data must include a Data Availability Statement specifying:

  • repository name;
  • DOI or other persistent identifier;
  • access type: open, restricted, or upon request;
  • data usage license.

Examples:

  • “The data supporting this study are available in the Zenodo repository, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1234567, under a CC BY 4.0 license.”
  • “The data cannot be publicly shared due to participant confidentiality but are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.”
  • “No external datasets were used in this study.”

4. Recommended Repositories

Authors are encouraged to use trusted repositories that support long-term preservation and persistent identifiers.

  • International repositories: Zenodo, Figshare, Dryad, OSF.
  • National repositories: NAES Repository, Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine.
  • Institutional repositories: repositories of universities and research institutions.

5. Metadata and Data Structure

Authors should use open and machine-readable formats, including CSV, JSON, XML, and TXT, where appropriate.

A README file should accompany the dataset and describe:

  • data structure and logic;
  • variable definitions and units of measurement;
  • data collection and processing methods;
  • guidelines for reuse.

Metadata should comply with international standards such as Dublin Core and the DataCite Metadata Schema.

6. Data Citation

All datasets with persistent identifiers must be cited in the reference list according to the DataCite standard.

Recommended format:
Author(s). (Year). Dataset title [Data set]. Repository. DOI: 10.xxxx/xxxxx

7. Archiving and Preservation

The journal supports long-term preservation of publications and datasets in repositories ensuring persistent access and identifiers.

8. Ethical Considerations

Authors must comply with confidentiality, personal data protection, intellectual property, research ethics, and security requirements. Any restrictions on data access must be clearly justified in the manuscript.

9. Editorial Control

The Editorial Office may conduct the following checks:

  • verification of the Data Availability Statement;
  • validation of dataset identifiers;
  • request for data confirmation if needed.

10. International Standards

This policy is based on FAIR Data principles and recommendations of COAR, DataCite, and OpenAIRE.

Note: Authors are responsible for the accuracy, completeness, legality, and ethical compliance of shared data.