Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy

Data Sharing & Accessibility Policy

Sinergi International Journal of Law supports responsible data sharing, research transparency, reproducibility, and FAIR data practices in legal and socio-legal research.

The journal encourages authors to make research data supporting their findings available whenever ethically, legally, and practically possible. In legal and socio-legal research, data sharing must respect confidentiality, privacy, legal privilege, court restrictions, intellectual property, contractual obligations, personal-data protection requirements, institutional policies, and other applicable laws.

1. Data Availability Statement

All research manuscripts must include a Data Availability Statement indicating whether supporting data are available, where they can be accessed, and any applicable conditions or restrictions. Relevant materials may include empirical legal datasets, survey responses, interview transcripts, court-decision datasets, regulatory documents, coded legislation, case-analysis files, administrative records, comparative-law datasets, statistical files, or other materials underlying the reported findings.

2. Data Repositories & Documentation

Where data can be shared, authors are encouraged to deposit them 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 a recognized institutional or disciplinary repository suitable for legal, socio-legal, public-policy, or social-science research.

Where research relies on publicly available legal materials such as legislation, regulations, treaties, court decisions, government documents, or official databases, authors should provide sufficiently precise citations, permanent links, identifiers, case numbers, document numbers, or other information that enables readers to locate and verify the sources.

Shared datasets should be accompanied by sufficient metadata, variable descriptions, codebooks, coding frameworks, jurisdictional information, source documentation, methodological explanations, and version information to support interpretation, verification, and responsible reuse.

3. Ethical, Legal & Confidential Data

Data sharing must not compromise ethical obligations, personal information, legal privilege, confidential communications, sealed or restricted court records, commercially sensitive information, intellectual property, protected institutional records, or third-party agreements.

4. Data Citation & FAIR Principles

Shared datasets should be cited appropriately in the manuscript and reference list. Where available, authors should provide the dataset's creator(s), title, repository, year, version, and DOI or other persistent identifier. Primary legal sources should also be cited according to appropriate legal and scholarly citation practices.

FAIR does not necessarily mean that all legal research data must be completely open. Where access is restricted, authors should provide sufficiently informative metadata and explain the legal, ethical, institutional, or contractual conditions under which access may be requested or obtained.

5. Editorial Oversight

The Editorial Team may request access to supporting or underlying data when necessary to verify reported findings, evaluate empirical or comparative legal analysis, investigate research-integrity concerns, or assess compliance with this policy.

Where unrestricted disclosure is not legally or ethically possible, editors may request confidential access to appropriately redacted or de-identified datasets, coding files, interview documentation, source records, methodological materials, or other supporting evidence needed for editorial verification.

Inaccurate or misleading data availability statements, unjustified refusal to provide supporting data or documentation for legitimate editorial verification, or serious inconsistencies between the article and its underlying data or legal sources 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 transparent, ethical, and responsible sharing of legal and socio-legal research data.