Open Access Policy and FAIR Principles

The editorial board of the Eastern Ukrainian Medical Journal supports the principles and values of Open Science and considers open scientific data as an important component of ensuring the transparency and reproducibility of scientific research.

This policy aims to increase the reliability of scientific results, promotes responsible management of research data, and encourages authors to place data in appropriate repositories unless this conflicts with ethical, legal, confidential, or security constraints.

The journal editorial board encourages authors to properly manage the research data underlying the published results and to disseminate them in accordance with the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability) principles:

  • Findable: Data can be easily found by both humans and computer systems thanks to unique identifiers (e.g., DOI).
  • Accessible: Data should be accessible through clearly defined protocols (e.g., open access or access on request).
  • Interoperable: Data should be presented in formats that allow it to be shared with other data sets.
  • Reusable: Data should be well described (metadata), have a unique identifier (e.g., DOI), and be released with a clear and accessible data usage license (e.g., Creative Commons).

This provides free online access to materials, archival data, and research results, which can be used, copied, and distributed in accordance with the license terms and with a mandatory reference to the original source. 

Primary data sets may include corpora of texts; digital copies of manuscripts and objects; tabular or structured data; research or survey results; graphical objects; audio and video materials; archival and other data.

The editorial board encourages the following main ways of providing access to research data:

  • publication of data as additional materials related to a scientific paper;
  • placing data in research data repositories, including institutional, national, or international (e.g., Harvard Dataverse, Figshare, Zenodo, etc.) with public metadata and permanent identifiers (e.g., DOI). 

If open access to data is not possible for ethical, legal, confidential or security reasons, authors should state this in the Data Accessibility Statement and briefly describe the reason for restricting access and possible conditions for providing it.

For studies involving human subjects or studies containing confidential data, authors must ensure that the privacy of study participants is protected. The editorial board encourages providing access only to depersonalized or anonymized data if permitted by the terms of ethical approval, informed consent, and applicable law. Data sharing should not create risks of re-identification of study participants or disclosure of confidential information.

The editorial board of the Eastern Ukrainian Medical Journal encourages authors of manuscripts submitted for consideration to add a Data Availability Statement to the manuscripts. Below are examples of possible wording:

  • Variant A: "The datasets analyzed in this study are available in the [name of repository] repository at [DOI or URL]."
  • Variant B: "Data are available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author due to [reason for access restriction, such as patient confidentiality]."
  • Variant C: "All data obtained during the study are included in this article and/or its appendices."
  • Variant D: “The data cannot be made publicly available due to ethical, legal, confidentiality, or security restrictions.”

The editorial board encourages authors to include the dataset DOI in the list of references, as a separate citation.