New Policy for Transparency of Data, Models, and Code

Many editorial boards are taking steps to improve the availability and reproducibility of work published in their respective journals. Following along the lines of the ASCE Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, the Editorial Board of the ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering is initiating a new policy to require authors to specify the availability of data, computational models, code, and other electronic materials used in work submitted for publication. We intend for this new policy to (1) make it easier for readers and others to use, reproduce, and extend published work; (2) increase the quality of submissions; and (3) further encourage people to use work published in the Journal and cite that work. We see this new policy as a step forward to allow readers, authors, and our field to practice more open and reproducible science.

When submitting a new manuscript, authors will include a new section titled “Data Availability Statement” before the “Acknowledgments.” Within this section, authors will select one or more of the following statements and list specific items as appropriate:

The Editorial Board encourages authors to make material available in a repository and to use a DOI to link to the repository to ensure a more permanent link from the article to the repository long into the future. The Editorial Board also encourages authors to store materials sites that provide long-term curation. Potential sites include ASCE (as article supplemental material), an institutional repository, HydroShare, Harvard Dataverse, Figshare, Dryad, or GitHub. Additionally, the repository should provide sufficient metadata and instructions so readers can correctly interpret content, use materials, and reproduce results and figures presented in the published article.

Available data and code must be cited in the References section. Authors may update or change their statement if information changes during the course of peer review. It may not be changed after the paper is accepted. More information on platforms for sharing data and code can be found in the ASCE Library (https://ascelibrary.org/page/dataavailability).