Medicine and Public Health

Medicine and Public Health is committed to fostering transparency, reproducibility, and the broad dissemination of research. The journal strongly encourages authors to make the research data supporting their findings available whenever legally and ethically permissible and clinically appropriate.

Commitment to Open Research

Sharing research data supports the verification of biomedical findings and enables the academic community to build upon existing work. The journal supports responsible open research practices while recognising that clinical and other sensitive datasets may be subject to ethical, legal, contractual, or privacy-related restrictions, including patient confidentiality and applicable data protection legislation, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) where applicable.

Authors are encouraged to make data available in a way that is transparent, durable, properly documented, and consistent with applicable legal, ethical, contractual, and privacy requirements.

Data Repositories and FAIR Principles

Recommended repositories may include Zenodo, Figshare, Harvard Dataverse, Mendeley Data, appropriate institutional research-data repositories, or recognised domain-specific biomedical repositories.

Where data cannot be made openly accessible because of ethical, legal, contractual, confidentiality, or privacy restrictions, Authors should use a repository or other secure mechanism that allows an appropriate form of controlled or restricted access where feasible.

Whenever possible, data should be provided in non-proprietary and reusable formats, such as .csv or .txt, together with sufficient documentation to support interpretation, verification, and reuse.

Data Availability Statement

All submitted manuscripts must include a Data Availability Statement on the Title Page. This statement will be incorporated into the final published version of the article and should explain whether and how the data, materials, code, or other resources supporting the findings can be accessed.

Authors should use one of the following templates, adapting it where necessary to reflect the circumstances of the study:

Responsible Sharing of Sensitive and Clinical Data

Authors must not make identifiable or potentially identifiable patient or participant data publicly available unless such disclosure is legally and ethically permissible and is consistent with the consent obtained from the participants.

Where datasets contain personal, clinical, genetic, or other sensitive information, Authors are responsible for applying appropriate anonymisation, access controls, data-use conditions, or other safeguards required by applicable law, ethical approval, informed consent, institutional policy, or contractual obligations.

The journal does not require Authors to make data publicly available where doing so would breach confidentiality, privacy, informed-consent conditions, legal requirements, ethical obligations, or legitimate third-party rights.

Supporting Materials and Code

Where relevant to the reproducibility or verification of the research, Authors are encouraged to make supporting materials, analytical code, statistical scripts, protocols, data dictionaries, questionnaires, and other research resources available alongside the underlying data or through an appropriate repository.

Any restrictions affecting access to these materials should be described in the Data Availability Statement.

Data Citation

Where a dataset has a formal citation, repository record, or persistent identifier, it should be cited in the text and included in the reference list in accordance with the journal’s Vancouver referencing style.

Where available, a data citation should include the Author or Authors, publication or release year, dataset title, repository, version where relevant, and a persistent identifier such as a DOI.