Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy

Data Sharing & Accessibility Policy

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

The journal encourages authors to make research data, source materials, interview records, survey data, archival materials, textual datasets, coding frameworks, analytical files, and other materials supporting research in Islamic studies available whenever ethically, legally, and practically possible. Data sharing must respect participant privacy, confidentiality, religious sensitivity, cultural considerations, intellectual property, archival restrictions, contractual obligations, and applicable laws.

1. Data Availability Statement

All research manuscripts must include a Data Availability Statement indicating whether supporting data or source materials are available, where they can be accessed, and any applicable conditions or restrictions. This may include interview transcripts, survey datasets, field notes, archival records, manuscript sources, textual corpora, historical documents, coding files, or other materials supporting the study findings.

2. Data Repositories & Documentation

Where research data and supporting materials can be shared, authors are encouraged to deposit them in a recognized disciplinary, general-purpose, humanities, social-science, 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 a recognized institutional, humanities, Islamic-studies, history, religious-studies, or social-science repository.

Shared materials should be provided in appropriate and reusable formats, accompanied by sufficient metadata, source descriptions, transcription conventions, coding information, methodological documentation, provenance information, translation notes, and contextual explanations to support interpretation and responsible reuse.

3. Ethical, Legal, Cultural & Confidential Data

Data sharing must not compromise ethical obligations, participant confidentiality, personal information, religious sensitivity, cultural considerations, community confidentiality, intellectual property, copyright, archival access conditions, or third-party agreements.

4. Data Citation & FAIR Principles

Shared datasets and research materials should be cited appropriately in the manuscript and reference list. Where available, authors should provide the creator(s), title, repository or archive, year, version, collection information, DOI, archival identifier, manuscript number, or other persistent identifier.

FAIR does not necessarily mean that all data, archival materials, interview records, or religious and cultural source materials must be completely open. Where access is restricted, authors should provide clear metadata and explain the ethical, legal, cultural, archival, copyright, or institutional conditions under which access may be obtained.

5. Research Transparency & Reproducibility

Authors should provide sufficient information to allow qualified researchers to understand how evidence was collected, selected, interpreted, analyzed, and used to support the reported conclusions. The level of reproducibility expected should be appropriate to the research design and disciplinary tradition.

For research involving Qur'anic texts, Hadith, classical Islamic literature, legal sources, manuscripts, translations, or historical documents, authors should provide sufficient bibliographic and source information to enable readers to identify and verify the materials used wherever reasonably possible.

6. Editorial Oversight

The Editorial Team may request confidential access to supporting data, interview materials, source documents, coding files, archival evidence, textual materials, translations, or other underlying research records when necessary to verify reported findings, investigate research-integrity concerns, or assess compliance with this policy.

Inaccurate or misleading data availability statements, unjustified refusal to provide supporting materials for confidential editorial verification, serious inconsistencies between the article and its underlying evidence, or concerns regarding source authenticity 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 sharing of research data, humanities and social-science materials, archival sources, and supporting scholarly evidence.