Data Policy

Authors should provide a data availability statement when data support the article.

Statements may identify publicly available datasets, explain reasonable access conditions, state that data are included in the article or supplementary files, or explain why data cannot be shared.

Data sharing must respect privacy, consent, ethics approvals, confidentiality, and legal restrictions.

Sensitive data involving identifiable people, communities, locations, commercial information, minors, vulnerable groups, or confidential fieldwork should only be shared where consent, anonymisation, ethics approval, and legal conditions allow it.

Authors should retain underlying evidence for a reasonable period after publication so that editors can investigate credible questions about accuracy, ethics, or reproducibility.

Datasets, codebooks, instruments, or supplementary files should be cited with persistent identifiers where available.