Believers Medical Journal (BeMJ) supports transparency, reproducibility, and research integrity in scholarly publishing. Authors are encouraged to make the data underlying their reported findings available whenever sharing is ethically, legally, contractually, and technically appropriate. Responsible data sharing can support verification, replication, secondary analysis, and further scientific investigation.
Data sharing must not compromise participant privacy, informed-consent conditions, confidentiality obligations, intellectual-property rights, or applicable institutional and regulatory requirements.
Research articles should include an accurate Data Availability Statement explaining whether and how the underlying data can be accessed. Appropriate formats may include:
"The data supporting the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, subject to applicable ethical, privacy, and institutional requirements."
"The data supporting this study are publicly available in [Repository Name] at [persistent link or accession number]."
"The data generated or analyzed during this study are not publicly available because of ethical, legal, contractual, privacy, or confidentiality restrictions. Information concerning permitted access may be obtained from [responsible contact or institution], where applicable."
Authors should ensure that the statement accurately reflects the actual accessibility and conditions governing the research data.
Where appropriate, authors are encouraged to deposit research data in a trusted disciplinary, institutional, general-purpose, or funder-designated repository that provides stable access and clearly defined conditions for data reuse.
Examples include:
Data sharing must be conducted responsibly and in accordance with applicable ethical and legal requirements. Authors should ensure that:
BeMJ recognizes that unrestricted public access to research data may not be appropriate or permissible in every study. Legitimate restrictions may include:
Restrictions may be necessary to protect identifiable or potentially re-identifiable health information, participant confidentiality, vulnerable populations, or limitations established through informed consent.
Access may be restricted because of data-use agreements, confidentiality obligations, statutory requirements, intellectual-property rights, or other binding legal or contractual conditions.
Legitimate restrictions may apply to proprietary information, patent-pending material, licensed datasets, or commercially sensitive information. Where applicable, such restrictions should be appropriately disclosed and justified.
During editorial assessment or peer review, BeMJ may request clarification regarding the Data Availability Statement, repository information, accession numbers, access conditions, supporting documentation, or other relevant records.
Any such assessment will take into account applicable ethical, privacy, legal, contractual, and institutional restrictions.
BeMJ encourages authors to follow recognized research-data management practices and FAIR data principles, where appropriate.
Authors are encouraged to provide:
These practices can improve data discovery, interpretation, verification, and responsible reuse.
This policy is reviewed periodically and may be updated when necessary to reflect developments in open-science practices, research-data management, repository standards, ethical guidance, legal requirements, and scholarly publishing procedures.
Authors remain responsible for the accuracy, integrity, documentation, lawful use, confidentiality, and appropriate sharing of research data associated with their work.
Believers Medical Journal (BeMJ) does not control, host, continuously verify, or guarantee the long-term availability of datasets deposited in independent third-party repositories.