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Transparency and Openness

Transparency and Openness Policy

Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems believes that research articles should contain sufficient information to allow others to understand, verify, and replicate findings. We therefore believe that whenever possible, authors should make evidence and resources that underpin published findings available to readers without undue barriers to access, and under licences that freely permit reuse. We encourage the submission of replication studies, particularly of research published in this journal.

How to comply with this policy

To comply with Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems’s Transparency Policy, you must:

  • Follow appropriate standards for disclosing aspects of your research design and data analysis. Many such standards can be found via the EQUATOR network.
  • State in your manuscript whether preregistration exists for your study or analysis plan, and if so, allow access for peer reviewers to verify it.
  • Include a Data Availability Statement in your manuscript. Please see the Cambridge University Press guidance for more information about Data Availability Statements, and some example statements.
  • Appropriately cite any data, code, and other resources used in your research in your manuscript’s reference list, alongside literature and other research outputs.

How to share resources

Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems encourages the sharing of resources through repositories that make content as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) as possible. Wherever possible, authors are encouraged to use repositories that:

  • Are committed to the long-term preservation and accessibility of their content.
  • Are supported and recognised by the community as appropriate for the resources they hold.
  • Provide stable, unique identifiers for the information they hold.
  • Support linking between their database records and associated published research articles.
  • Allow free public access to their holdings, with reasonable exceptions (such as administration charges for the distribution of physical materials).

If there are domain-specific, specialised repositories in common use in your research community, we recommend using those to share resources. FAIRsharing provides a database of repositories that can be filtered by domain.

Generalist repositories, which can host a wide variety of data types, may also be used if no appropriate specialised repository exists. Examples of general repositories include Zenodo, Dataverse, Dryad, and the Open Science Framework. Guidance for preparing qualitative data for sharing is provided by bodies such as the Qualitative Data Repository and ICPSR.

If necessary, resources may also be shared as supplementary material.

Citing data and other resources

Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems authors to cite data, code, and other resources in their manuscript’s reference list, alongside literature and other research outputs. As a general rule, enough identifying elements to precisely specify which code or data have been used should be included. Cambridge University Press provides further guidance on data citation.

Questions

For any questions about this policy, please contact the editorial office.