Evaluating data citation and sharing policies in the environmental sciences

The need to share and cite data is central to a scientific method that depends on verifiable results. Recent events in the field of environmental science underscore the need to hold researchers accountable for their claims and a desire amongst domain practitioners to make findings more widely accessible. The report that follows is a preliminary analysis of the data sharing and citation policies of three types of stakeholders in environmental science research: organizations funding work, journals publishing findings, and repositories archiving primary data. Our aim is to acquire a holistic view of the data sharing policies affecting environmental science researchers, in order to inform studies of the influence of these policies on scientists' data sharing behavior, and ultimately guide development of best practices. Our initial analysis found that an overwhelming majority of funding agencies, repositories and journals fail to provide explicit directions for sharing and citing data. Many policies are vague in their directions as to how data should be shared or archived, and how attribution should be noted for secondary data use. These results point to major gaps in data policy in the environmental sciences.