Long-term readers may remember my efforts to get the International Journal of Climatology to adopt a sensible policy on data and materials - this was prompted by Steve McIntyre's attempts to extract information from the journal and one of its authors, Ben Santer.
At that point the journal had no policy, simply referring requesters to the author, and apparently happy to let the authors refuse if they wished. IJOC is a journal of the Royal Meterological Society, and the society's head, Paul Hardaker, was initially very favourable, with an undertaking to instigate a review. However, as months turned into years it became fairly clear that the society was caught between a rock and a hard place. If their policy was tough enough to ensure that data became disclosable then mainstream climatologists would not publish there. Climategate brought some confirmation of this, with the revelation of an email in which Santer and Jones discussed a boycott of the journal over a future data policy. Santer's words:
If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available - raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations - I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals.
I have returned to Prof Hardaker every six months or so to inquire after the policy, and I discovered today that the policy has finally appeared on the journal's website.
The basic policy looks rather weak to me:
...a condition of publication in a Royal Meteorological Society journal is that authors are required, if requested, to make materials and data promptly available to readers where it is possible to do so under the restrictions of institutional or third party licensing agreements. Any restrictions on the availability of materials or information must be disclosed to the Editor at the time of submission...
Any data associated with the submitted article must be made available to Editors and peer-reviewers at the time of review, if requested by the Editor, in order to ensure a comprehensive peer-review process...
After publication, readers who encounter refusal by the authors to comply with this policy should contact the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. In cases where Editors are unable to resolve a complaint, the journal may refer the matter to the Society through its Chief Executive.
This in essence looks like the Nature policy - you don't need to submit data unless we ask (and who can forget Schneider telling McIntyre that he'd never received a request from a peer reviewer to examine data in 28 years as a journal editor). As I've said before, this simply stores up trouble for the journal. If authors refuse to disclose their data, the journal has few options - in fact in IJoC's case they only give themselves the option to "refer the matter to the society". I can hear the authors quaking at the thought of it.
THere is one caveat to all this - there is a separate policy on data papers, which the journal defines as papers about a data set.
Authors of such papers are required to deposit their data sets in a data centre that meets the criteria discussed above...
Data sets that are the basis of data papers will be subject to review. A sample of these data sufficient for the review process must be supplied with the submission of the paper. The reviewer is expected to comment on the data as if they were an integral part of the paper.
Data sets for data papers must include a descriptive ‘metadata’ section that provides the user with key information about the collection, preparation and use of the data set.
It strikes me that there is a lot of wriggle room here.