Ethical and security considerations

If data access is restricted for ethical or security reasons, the manuscript must include:
- a description of the restrictions on the data;
- the Editorial Board's position on data sharing; and
- all necessary information required for a reader or reviewer to apply for access to the data and the conditions under which access will be granted.

Data protection issues
In order to protect the privacy of participants, research data must not be published if it is not possible to effectively remove personally identifiable information from the data set, unless the individuals have given express written consent to the public release of data containing personally identifiable information.

In instances where the data cannot be made available, the manuscript must include:
- an explanation of the data protection concern;
- any intermediary data that can be de-identified without compromising anonymity;
- the Editorial Board's position on data sharing, and
- where applicable, all necessary information required for a reader or peer reviewer to apply for access to the data and the conditions under which access will be granted.

In addition, the addresses where the data are located should be provided in the Data Accessibility Statement within the submitted manuscript. If data is not being made available within the journal publication, a statement from the author should be provided to explain why. When depositing data for a submission, the below should be considered:
- The repository the data is deposited in must be suitable for this subject and have a sustainability model.
- The data must be deposited under an open license that permits unrestricted access (e.g., CC0, CC-BY). More restrictive licenses should only be used if a valid reason (e.g., legal) is present.
- The deposited data must include a version that is in an open, non-proprietary format.
- The deposited data must have been labelled in such a way that a 3rd party can make sense of it (e.g., sensible column headers, descriptions in a readme text file). 
- Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Where applicable, the studies must have been approved by an appropriate Ethics Committee. The identity of the research subject should be anonymized whenever possible. For research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study must be obtained from participants (or their legal guardian).
- A ‘Data Accessibility Statement’ should be added to the submission, prior to the reference list, providing the details of the data accessibility, including the DOI linking to it. If the data is restricted in any way, the reasoning should be given.