Journal of

The Journal of Surgery and Trauma follows the Basic Data Sharing Policy. The journal is committed to promoting an open research environment that accelerates discovery and enhances the reproducibility and verification of data, methodologies, and reporting standards. Authors are strongly encouraged to cite and share their research data, including but not limited to raw data, processed data, software, algorithms, protocols, methods, and materials. Data sharing should be carried out in a manner that does not compromise the privacy or security of human subjects or other sensitive information.

Authors are encouraged to archive the data and other materials supporting their article in an appropriate public repository and to include a Data Accessibility Statement linking to that repository.

The Journal of Surgery and Trauma requires authors submitting Original Investigations, Case Reports, and Special Papers to:

1. Deposit all de-identified data related to the manuscript in a repository.

2. Include a Data Availability Statement specifying where and how the data can be accessed.

Data are defined as all digital materials underlying the results presented in the manuscript, such as spreadsheets, text files, interview recordings or transcripts, images, videos, statistical software outputs, and computer code or scripts. Authors must deposit at least the minimum amount of data necessary to reproduce the results.

Data repositories may include institutional, general, or discipline-specific platforms that provide public access and persistent identifiers, such as Figshare, Open Science Framework, Zenodo, Dryad, Harvard Dataverse, or OpenICPSR.

The Data Availability Statement should appear at the end of the main text before the References section and include:

1. The location of the data.

2. A unique identifier (DOI, accession number, or persistent URL).

3. Any relevant access instructions.

Upon submission, authors must indicate whether a data set is associated with the article. If so, they should provide the DOI, preregistered DOI, hyperlink, or other persistent identifier. When a preregistered DOI is used, authors may be asked to share the reviewer URL for evaluation purposes.

Data sets associated with a manuscript are not subject to peer review during the submission process. Ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the data remains the sole responsibility of the authors.

As submissions to the Journal of Surgery and Trauma undergo double-blind peer review, authors must not include identifying information in the main text (for example, names, affiliations, funding sources, or conflicts of interest). Because a Data Availability Statement could inadvertently reveal author identity, it should be omitted from the anonymized version of the manuscript submitted for review.

Exceptions to this policy are granted only in cases where data cannot be shared due to proprietary limitations, patient privacy, or ethical concerns. In such cases, authors should anonymize data or obtain appropriate permissions before submission. For guidance, authors should consult their institutional ethics committee.

Examples of Data Availability Statements

1. Data associated with this article are available in the Open Science Framework at [URL].

2. The data supporting this study are openly available in [repository name] at http://doi.org/[DOI], reference number [reference number].

3. The data supporting this study are openly available in [repository name] at [URL], reference number [reference number].

4. The data supporting this study are available in [repository name] at [URL/DOI], reference number [reference number]. These data were derived from publicly available sources listed in [URLs].

Benefits of Data Sharing

Sharing data provides several key advantages:

• Ensures long-term preservation of research data.

• Enables formal citation and credit through repositories that assign persistent identifiers such as DOIs.

• Promotes data reuse, meta-analyses, and new discoveries.

• Enhances research transparency, reproducibility, and validation.

• Facilitates the translation of research findings into practice.

Levels of Data Sharing Policies

The Journal of Surgery and Trauma adopts standardized levels of data sharing policies across all submissions:

• Basic – Authors are encouraged to share and make data open when it does not conflict with participant privacy or ethical restrictions.

• Share upon reasonable request – Authors agree to provide data upon reasonable request, subject to their discretion about what constitutes a reasonable request.

• Publicly available – Authors make their data freely accessible under a chosen license.

• Open data – Authors make data publicly available under a license permitting reuse for any lawful purpose.

• Open and fully FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable) – Authors make data fully open under a license allowing reuse for any lawful purpose while ensuring compliance with FAIR principles as defined within their field.