Before submitting your paper

Please follow these steps before submitting your paper for the first time or after making significant changes to your data:

• Familiarize yourself with our Data and Code Availability Policy.

• Carefully review the terms of use for your data and ensure compliance with all requirements. Note that not all publicly available datasets permits redistribution or re-publication (here is an unofficial summary of terms of use of some standard datasets).
• If you are unable to meet a specific requirement, submit a Cover Letter requesting an exemption and explaining the reasons preventing you from complying with the policy. Tick the relevant box in the Editorial Express platform. Please note that exemptions must be requested at the time of the first submission; they cannot be requested later.

Visit our FAQs section for more information on situations in which exemptions can be granted.

Granting exemptions

Once your paper is submitted, the handling co-editor will assess whether sufficient grounds exist to grant an exemption and evaluate how the exemption may affect the paper's significance. Based on this evaluation, the handling co-editor will take one of the following actions:

• Proceed with the review process, sending your paper to referees.
• Summarily reject your paper.
• Contact you to request additional information, documentation, or any other requirements needed to assess the suitability of the requested exemption.

Exemptions are tacitly granted when your paper is sent out to referees, and the handling co-editor will not explicitly notify you of this decision.

When exemptions are granted

Upon conditional acceptance of your paper, you will be asked to provide a replication package following our guidelines to submit the replication package. If an exemption has been granted, you will need to choose at least one of the following options:

• Provide temporary access to the Data Editor (and the reproducibility team) to the data affected by the exemption. This access is solely for the purpose of conducting reproducibility checks. Check in the terms of use of your data whether you are allowed to provide such access (here is an unofficial summary of terms of use of some standard datasets). Obtaining permission to confidentially share your data with us is your responsibility.
• Include a synthetic or simulated dataset in the replication package. This dataset should allow users to run the code and verify that it generates all the outputs from the paper and appendices, even if the results differ from those in the paper.

For more guidance on building your replication package when an exemption has been granted, consult our FAQs.