Tropical Plant Pathology - Joining forces with Open Plant Pathology in our move towards transparency and reproducibility
Mar 13 2020
By Emerson Del Ponte, Editor-in-Chief
We recently talked with our publisher about our desire to enhance transparency and reproducibility of the plant pathology research through the adoption of editorial policies that help to promote data quality, sharing and reproducibility (this opens in a new tab). Traditionally, only molecular/taxonomy-related plant disease data have been required to be deposited in publicly available repositories (e.g. GenBank, NCBI Assembly, etc), but there is no reason why all kinds of datasets (response variables in experiments, images, etc.) on which the conclusions of the paper rely should not be available to readers.
We agreed to change our data policy to Data Policy Type 3 (for life sciences - more details here (this opens in a new tab)) that is used across the Nature Research and BMC journals. This means that we will strongly encourage that all datasets are either presented in additional supporting files or made available in recommended repositories (where available and appropriate).
During submission, authors will now be required a data availability statement. As an experimental step to prepare our board members, reviewers and authors for a future move to the Type 4 data policy (enforces data sharing), we are partnering with Open Plant Pathology (this opens in a new tab)to establish a Reproducibility team.
One of our current Associate Editors, Dr. Adam Sparks (this opens in a new tab) (pictured) is taking over as the first Reproducibility Editor and will lead a team of Assistant Editors, including Dr. Zhian Kamvar (this opens in a new tab). This team will interact with authors of selected manuscripts that advance to the review stage to strongly encourage data sharing and offer help to speed up preparetion and documentation of data for review and/or after the paper is accepted.
We are excited about this new move! As far as known, we are the first journal in the field to adopt editorial practices that we hope will be beneficial for the authors as well. We hope the other plant pathology journals make a similar move to make this standard practice, whenever possible, in our discipline.