Availability of Materials and Data

Ethics / Ethical Guidelines

By publishing in the journal, the authors agree that, subject to requirements or limitations imposed by laws or governmental regulations of the United States, any materials and data that are reasonably requested by others will be made available. Such materials may include, but are not limited to, DNAs, viruses, microbial strains, mutant animal strains, cell lines, and antibodies that are described in the article. These must be available from a national collection or be made available in a timely fashion, at reasonable cost, and in limited quantities to members of the scientific community for noncommercial purposes. The authors guarantee that they have the authority to comply with this policy either directly or by means of material transfer agreements through the owner.

Data Citation Statement. To promote reproducibility, ASM expects researchers to identify and cite data sets and/or code used in their experiments and studies. These may be large or complex data sets that can include, but are not limited to, data from microarray, genomic, structural, proteomic, or video imaging analyses. Authors should cite both the data set repository and the published article in which the data set and/or code was originally described. Citations of data should be included in the reference list with persistent unique identifiers (e.g., active DOIs, accession numbers, etc.). If computer code or software was created to generate results or interpret data, then a statement to that effect should be included in the “Data availability” paragraph. In cases where the software is publicly available (e.g., FigTree to generate phylogenetic trees), the URL of the software informational page should be provided. It is preferred that authors use established, publicly available data type-specific repositories. If there is no appropriate repository available, general publicly available repositories should be used (e.g., Dryad, figshare, etc.). Below is an overview of the elements that should appear in a data citation, as well as examples of complete data citations. Please note that similar information is available in the References section of the Instructions to Authors of each journal.

The components of a complete data citation include the following:

  • Responsible party (senior author, collector, agency),
  • Publication year,
  • Complete name of a data set, including the name of the database or repository and its URL, or the name of the analysis software (if appropriate), including the version and project,
  • Publisher (if appropriate), and
  • Persistent unique identifier(s) (e.g., URL[s] or accession number[s]).

The following templates may be helpful.

Author. Year. Description of study topic. Retrieved from Database URL (accession no. ••••••). {Unpublished raw data.}
Author. Year. Description or title of software (version). Repository URL. Retrieved day month year. {Software or code.}

Examples follow.

Christian SL, McDonough J, Liu C-Y, Shaikh S, Vlamakis V, Badner JA, Chakravarti A, Gershon ES. 2002. Data from “An evaluation of the assembly of an approximately 15-Mb region on human chromosome 13q32-q33 linked to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.” GenBank https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/AF339794 (accession no. AF339794). {Accession number.}
Sun Z. 2013. Reprocessed: in-depth membrane proteomic study of breast cancer tissues. ProteomeXchange http://proteomecentral.proteomexchange.org/cgi/GetDataset?ID=RPXD000665 (accession number requested). {Unassigned accession number.}
Hogle S. 2015. Supplemental material for Hogle et al. 2015 mBio. figshare https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1533034.v1. Retrieved 16 March 2017. {Code and/or software.}
Nesbitt HK, Moore JW. 2016. Data from “Species and population diversity in Pacific salmon fisheries underpin indigenous food security.” Dryad Digital Repository https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ng8pf. {Data set in repository.}

Manuscript submissions that have appeared in preprint archives should cite the preprint in References, and the fact that a paper has appeared online before should be mentioned parenthetically at the end of the introductory section: (This article was submitted to an online preprint archive [1].) The reference should take the form noted above in the reference below.

Wang Y, Rozen D. 2016. Colonization and transmission of the gut microbiota of the burying beetle, Nicrophorus vespilloides, through development. bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/091702.

For more information, please see ASM editorials regarding availability of materials/data. If an author wishes to transfer a manuscript to (or from) mBio, mSphere or mSystems, please be mindful of the data policy guidelines and resources:

 

UPDATED January 2018