Usage Policy

Toronto Agreement

• Explicitly informing applicants of data-release requirements, especially mandatory prepublication data release
• Ensuring that evaluation of data release plans is part of the peer-review process
• Proactively establishing analysis plans and timelines for projects releasing data prepublication
• Fostering investigator-initiated prepublication data release
• Helping to develop appropriate consent, security, access and governance mechanisms that protect research participants while encouraging prepublication data release
• Providing long-term support of databases

Data producers should state their intentions and enable analyses of their data by:

• Informing data users about the data being generated, data standards and quality, planned analyses, timelines, and relevant contact information, ideally through publication of a citable marker paper near the start of the project or by provision of a citable URL at the project or funding-agency website
• Providing relevant metadata (e.g., questionnaires, phenotypes, environmental conditions, and laboratory methods) that will assist other researchers in reproducing and/or independently analysing the data, while protecting interests of individuals enrolled in studies focusing on humans
• Ensuring that research participants are informed that their data will be shared with other scientists in the research community
• Publishing their initial global analyses, as stated in the marker paper or citable URL, in a timely fashion
• Creating databases designed to archive all data (including underlying raw data) in an easily retrievable form and facilitate usage of both pre-processed and processed data

Data analysts/users should freely analyse released prepublication data and act responsibly in publishing analyses of those data by:

• Respecting the scientific etiquette that allows data producers to publish the first global analyses of their data set
• Reading the citeable document associated with the project
• Accurately and completely citing the source of prepublication data, including the version of the data set (if appropriate)
• Being aware that released prepublication data may be associated with quality issues that will be later rectified by the data producers
• Contacting the data producers to discuss publication plans in the case of overlap between planned analyses
• Ensuring that use of data does not harm research participants and is in conformity with ethical approvals
• Scientific journal editors should engage the research community about issues related to prepublication data release and provide guidance to authors and reviewers on the third-party use of prepublication data in manuscripts

Working