Journal editor: It is up to the author to release their data

I received this email from a journal editor in political science after I asked about their replication policy. My original email is below.

Nicole,

We have only recently began thinking through a policy on this so at this
point, it is up to the author to release their data.

_____ (name withheld)

—–Original Message—–

From: Nicole Janz
To: ________________
Subject: replication data

Dear ________________,

I am a human rights researcher at Cambridge University, and I also do research on data transparency and reproducibility in the field.

I am writing to you to enquire about the replication data policy of ___________ (journal name). Many journals ask the authors to provide their data and software code. I could not see such a policy online, but I may be mistaken.

In particular, I have asked an author who published with _______________ to share the data with me in several instances. The author replied that the data were going to be shared within a few weeks. When I did not hear back after many months, I wrote again. This time, I never received a reply. I do not have any reason to doubt the validity of the results, but I was interested examining the data further and doing some robustness checks which would then inform my future research on the topic. So far, this has not been possible.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this.

Best regards,
Nicole Janz

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