To further promote open data and data reuse, Nature Ecology & Evolution is partnering with Springer Nature’s Research Data Support service to enable authors to directly access Research Data Support from the journal’s submission system.

As a result, Nature Ecology & Evolution authors who would like more support with sharing their data will receive help from Research Data Editors. Research Data Editors identify suitable repositories for the data supporting manuscripts and provide information on other options for data sharing. And for the many researchers without community-specific data repositories, Research Data Support can provide hands-on data deposition and curation support to publish data openly in the Nature Research figshare repository.

Nearly 100 journals across Springer Nature have integrated their manuscript submission process with Research Data Support, and figshare is a resource already used by some authors publishing in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

As with all Nature Research journals, Nature Ecology & Evolution has an established data availability policy, mandating deposition for specific types of data, and requiring all authors provide data availability statements. This initiative provides another resource for authors, who will still be welcome to deposit their data in any of our recommended repositories themselves and seek free advice from the Research Data Support team via our helpdesk.

The ecology and evolution research community has embraced open data, in particular since 2010 when journals began adopting and implementing the Joint Data Archiving Policy.

There are now numerous sources of open data in EcoEvo research and tools for their aggregation, which help promote reuse such as meta-analysis, have begun to emerge. But these resources are reportedly underused. Sufficient information about datasets - metadata - is needed to understand and reuse data. This optional Research Data Support service adds professionally curated metadata, and human-readable summaries to datasets, which enables datasets to be better understood, and ultimately reused.

The integration of this service into Nature Ecology & Evolution’s manuscript submission system is being initiated on a trial basis, and will report back on the outcomes in due course.