Six Simple Steps to Share Your Data When Publishing Research Articles

In this article, I provide six simple steps for authors to make their data available and meet the most common data publishing requirements for both open‐access and non‐open–access journals. These steps are simple and can easily be integrated into authors' workflows when conducting research and writing research articles. The steps include: deciding authorship of the dataset vs. authorship of the research article; exporting the data needed for all article analyses into archivable (preferably plain text) files using simple table formats; writing the metadata; depositing the data and metadata in a data repository; writing a data availability statement in the article; and citing the dataset in the methods and literature cited sections. Authors who implement these guidelines will reap many benefits for their science while also following best practices for open, robust, and reproducible science.