One of the key principles of open research is that any associated data from a study should also be accessible. Making research data accessible improves reproducibility of study findings and safeguards wider scientific integrity. As a researcher looking to submit your research, it’s important that you are familiar with the practice of writing a data availability statement in case you should need to produce one as part of your submission.
What is a data availability statement?
Simply, a data availability statement is a description of the data from a study and where it can be located. Links to the necessary datasets are typically provided in this statement.
The seven components of a data availability statement as outlined by Zenodo include:
- Description of data.
- Location of data.
- Link to data.
- Data documentation.
- Eligibility criteria.
- Conditions for use.
- Access request details.
These components facilitate discoverability, access, and reuse in scholarly publishing. They from part of the wider scope of open practices that seek to address issues such as research integrity and the reproducibility crisis in scientific publishing.
Are data availability statements mandatory for preprints?
There is no definitive answer to the question of whether data availability statements are mandatory. However, there is increasing emphasis on transparency in scientific publishing, and certain frameworks are being established to support the open sharing of data.
One of the six components of the 2025 ASAPbio Preprint Policy Framework—a new protocol for building consistent, open practices for sharing preprints and advancing open science communication—is ‘resource availability’. This component includes providing statements describing how to access related data, code, software, protocols, and materials.
Preprint platforms such as Preprints.org do not strictly require you to submit a data availability statement, but generally encourage providing such back matter and making all data associated with your submission available where there are no legal or confidentiality constraints in doing so.
How to write one (with examples)
Writing a data availability statement is typically a straightforward exercise, so long as you are familiar with common scenarios and statement examples. Let’s look at some now.
| Scenario | Example Statement |
| Publicly available data | “The code and evaluation data supporting the SAWYER case study are archived with a persistent identifier on Zenodo [42], DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22822695, and are also available as the versioned GitHub release v1.0.1 at https://github.com/IrtiqaHaider/sawyer-rlhf/releases/tag/v1.0.1. The release includes training and evaluation code, experiment configurations, dataset split identifiers, training logs, paired model outputs and reward scores for the 100-prompt evaluation, and AI-judge annotations for the 25-example exploratory audit. The evaluation instructions, data schema, and procedures for recalculating the reported aggregate results are documented in the repository. The source training datasets are Databricks Dolly-15k [37] and Anthropic HH-RLHF [38]; their provenance, versions, and applicable licensing information are documented separately. The released materials support inspection and reanalysis of the reported findings.” |
| Data available with restrictions | “The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.” |
| Data not available | “This study analyzed de-identified electronic health record data. The data were extracted under an established privacy-preserving protocol and cannot be shared beyond what is reported here due to the parameters of the expert determination.” |
Your data availability statement will be a short paragraph that covers the components described previously where applicable. If your data are publicly available, make sure that access and reuse instructions are clear. If in doubt, get a fellow peer to read over your statement and see if they would be able to follow the instructions for the purposes of reproducibility.
Generally, your data availability statement goes before your References section. Always check with the journal or preprint platform you are submitting to for formatting guidelines.
When it comes to choosing a data repository, you want to find one that follows FAIR Data Principles and can guarantee long-term preservation and metadata that facilitates discoverability and reuse, such as Re3data and Zenodo.
For more information data and supplementary files, see our Instructions for Authors.