Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy

Data Sharing & Accessibility Policy

Sinergi International Journal of Education supports responsible data sharing, research transparency, reproducibility, and FAIR data practices.

The journal encourages authors to make research data supporting their findings available whenever ethically, legally, and practically possible. This may include student or teacher data, assessment results, survey datasets, interview or observation data, educational intervention data, learning analytics, research instruments, coding frameworks, and other supporting research materials. Data sharing must respect participant privacy, confidentiality, informed consent, institutional requirements, intellectual property, contractual obligations, and applicable laws.

1. Data Availability Statement

All research manuscripts must include a Data Availability Statement indicating whether supporting data and related research materials are available, where they can be accessed, and any applicable conditions or restrictions.

2. Data Repositories & Documentation

Where data can be shared, authors are encouraged to deposit educational datasets, research instruments, coding materials, analytical scripts, supplementary files, and other supporting research objects in a recognized disciplinary, general-purpose, or institutional repository that provides stable access and, preferably, a persistent identifier such as a DOI.

Appropriate repositories may include Zenodo, Figshare, Harvard Dataverse, Dryad, Open Science Framework (OSF), or recognized institutional or disciplinary repositories appropriate to educational research.

Data should be provided in appropriate, reusable, and preferably open or machine-readable formats, accompanied by sufficient metadata, variable descriptions, coding information, data dictionaries, research-instrument documentation, methodological information, and analytical details to support interpretation, verification, and responsible reuse.

3. Ethical, Legal & Confidential Data

Data sharing must not compromise ethical obligations, participant confidentiality, student or teacher privacy, personal information, identifiable educational records, institutional confidentiality, intellectual property, copyrighted research instruments, or third-party agreements.

4. Data Citation & FAIR Principles

Shared datasets, research instruments, educational resources, analytical scripts, codebooks, and other research objects should be cited appropriately in the manuscript and reference list. Where available, authors should provide the resource's creator(s), title, repository, year, version, and DOI or other persistent identifier.

FAIR does not necessarily mean that all data must be completely open. Where access is restricted, authors should provide clear metadata and explain the legitimate conditions under which access may be obtained while protecting students, teachers, research participants, and confidential institutional information.

5. Editorial Oversight

The Editorial Team may request access to supporting or underlying data, assessment results, survey datasets, interview transcripts, observation records, research instruments, coding files, analytical outputs, or other documentation when necessary to verify reported results, investigate research-integrity concerns, assess reproducibility, or evaluate compliance with this policy.

Inaccurate or misleading data availability statements, unjustified refusal to provide supporting materials for legitimate editorial verification, inaccessible repositories without explanation, or serious inconsistencies between the published article and underlying data may result in further editorial review and appropriate action under the journal's publication-ethics and post-publication policies.

This policy is informed by the COPE Core Practice on Data and Reproducibility, the COPE–DOAJ–OASPA–WAME Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, the FAIR Guiding Principles, and established international practices for responsible research-data management, educational research, reproducibility, and ethical data sharing.