ScienceDB is a public data repository dedicated to providing services for data sharing. At ScienceDB, we have no restriction imposed on the discipline, subject matter, data size, or files format of submissions. It mainly shares and publishes the following data types: dataset, figure and table of publication, slide and code.

1) Dataset

It mainly refers to the data generated through basic research, applied research, experimental development, etc. in the fields of natural science, engineering technology science, etc., as well as the original data and its derivatives obtained through observation and monitoring, investigation, inspection, testing and used in scientific research activities. The dataset is mainly organized in the form of file sets.

Please note that dataset submissions should not contain manuscripts or published articles.

2) Figure and table in publication

Figure and table in publication mainly refer to those supplementary data documents pertaining to an unpublished manuscript or published article.

3) Slide

Slide mainly refer to slides used for speeches, reports or presentations at academic conferences. It is required that the content of the slide can clearly cite other people’s opinions, achievements and other information.

4) Code

Code mainly refers to program documentation such as source codes, pseudocodes for algorithm implementation, etc.

Data Community is a form of data content organization and management under ScienceDB. It is managed by a specific Data Community Administrator. The Data Community relies on ScienceDB and ScienceDB’s operation & maintenance team provides related services and technical support for Data Community. ScienceDB encourages and supports multiple forms of data communities, such as journal data communities, institutional data communities, etc.

Each Data Community has its own dedicated Data Community Administrator. The Data Community Administrator formulates specific management regulations for the corresponding Data Community on the basis of ScienceDB’s Terms of Service and Data Policy. The Data Community Administrator is responsible for the data review in the corresponding Data Community under its own jurisdiction.

The Data Community and the Data Community Administrator are supervised by ScienceDB. Users can choose a specific Data Community to submit their data, and the data submitted by users will be reviewed by the Data Community Administrator of this Data Community, released on ScienceDB and included in this Data Community.

At ScienceDB, all the depositors are obliged to follow the codes of conduct below:

1) Promise to the data authenticity

All data shall be produced in real scientific scenarios and shall not contain altered, fabricated, misleading or falsified contents.

2) Promise to the regulatory compliance

The data collection and generation process shall comply with regional and disciplinary laws & regulations, industry guidelines and ethical codes, and the data contents shall not violate the relevant regulations on open data sharing.

3) Statement on data rights & interests

Data depositors shall have the corresponding intellectual property rights (including but not limited to the right of authorship, the right of publication, the right to modify, the right to protect the integrity of the work, and other legal rights stipulated by law) or have been authorized by the subject of the legal rights of the submitted data to submit the corresponding data. The foregoing rights do not transfer to ScienceDB as a result of their submission.

In order to perform and complete services such as data storage, publishing and sharing, the data depositors at ScienceDB shall grant ScienceDB the right to use your data within a reasonable range, including but not limited to data replication, information network dissemination, etc.

Data depositors shall confirm that the authorship list is organized in an order that reflects the authors’ contributions, and that all author information provided is correct, including authors’ affiliations, ORCID, etc. Data depositors should clearly provide information on all funders that provided financial support for the data generation process.

If the data authors have any special instructions on how to cite the contribution of their data, the data depositors should describe this issue accurately and completely in the “Dataset Description” or “Data File”. Under the premise of meeting the requirements of relevant laws, regulations and normative documents, data authors may require data users to recognize author contributions in the following methods, including but not limited to: citations, acknowledgements, co-authors of papers, co-developers of products, financial compensation, etc.

If the data authors have any other statement for their data, the data depositors should describe the statement accurately and completely in the “Dataset Description” or “Data File”.

4) Obligation to report data errors

If, at any point, data depositors and authors become aware of major errors or inaccuracies in their published data, they shall contact ScienceDB for data update or retraction as soon as possible. They also need to contact the editorial office of corresponding journals for paper revision or retraction whenever appropriate.

5) ScienceDB’s statement and requirement for duplicate data publishing

ScienceDB accepts data that has been published in other data repositories or platforms while archiving on ScienceDB.

If published data aims for archiving on ScienceDB, the data depositors shall provide the DOI of the published data, as well as the authors of the data, the name of the first release platform or publisher, the first release time, version information, related paper information and other necessary contents. At the same time, data depositors shall ensure the archiving data under the same data license agreement as to its original published version. ScienceDB no longer registers DOI or CSTR for such data.

6) Special notes for some scientific data

Human-related research data

Data submission involving human-related research data shall comply with the provisions and requirements of relevant laws and regulations or other normative documents. Data depositors shall state that they have obtained the informed consent of subjects and other relevant personnel, that experiments can be conducted on human subjects, and must always comply with human subjects’ legitimate rights and interests such as their privacy rights, and adopt data governance measures that protect personal privacy. For data files involving human data, the data depositors shall abide by the terms of the contract or agreement with the subject or the respondent entrusted with providing personal information.

Data depositors are required to submit a Science Data Bank Data Desensitization Commitment Statement (for more in “Sensitive data masking” section).

All submissions of research data involving human genetic resources shall conform to relevant laws and regulations or other normative documents. If the data is generated in China, data depositors are required to include an approval letter on human genetic research (The regulations refer to the Regulations of P.R.C. on the Administration of Human Genetic Resources)

Animal-related research data

The data submission involving animal-related research data shall comply with the provisions and requirements of relevant laws and regulations or other normative documents. For data involving animal experiments, it is recommended to follow the ARRIVE guidelines and other guidelines, such as the UK’s Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, the EU’s Directive 2010/63/EU - the Protection of Animals Used for Scientific Purposes, the US’s Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (Eighth Edition).

If the data is generated in China, it shall comply with the relevant regulations and requirements of the Biosafety Law of P.R.C. and other documents.

Medical trial data

Data submissions involving medical trials shall comply with the provisions and requirements of relevant laws and regulations or other normative documents. For data involving medical trials, if the data is generated in China, the data depositor should follow the relevant regulations and requirements of the Measures for Ethical Review of Biomedical Research Involving Humans and other documents. Data depositors are required to submit a Science Data Bank Data Desensitization Commitment Statement (for more in “Sensitive data masking” section).

Map data

Data submission involving national maps or world maps shall comply with the requirements of relevant laws and regulations or other normative documents. For maps involving national boundaries and two or more provincial-level administrative regions, please draw according to the latest standard base map of the Ministry of Natural Resources. If it is produced by an entity with map drawing qualifications or has a map approval certificate, please provide relevant certificates and other essential documents.

Sensitive data masking

Data submission involving sensitive information and has been desensitized, Data depositors are required to fill out and submit a Science Data Bank Data Desensitization Commitment Statement.

In the abovementioned statement, data depositors shall state that all sensitive data have been effectively and irreversibly masked, and the methods of data masking can be described wherever necessary. If there are audit certification materials provided by the affiliation, please submit to ScienceDB official email (sciencedb@cnic.cn) in the form of an attachment.

It is data depositors and data authors’ responsibility to ensure no sensitive data in their data submission. In case of privacy infringement or public security violation, data depositors and data authors shall take the corresponding responsibilities and accept mandatory withdrawal of the data.

This section specifies the review criteria that ScienceDB uses to decide on a submission.

All data review criteria mentioned below are only standards for data submission at ScienceDB, and should not be taken as general rules or guidelines.

1) whether the data submission meets ScienceDB core metadata standards

For more information, please visit the Data Submission page or the Data Publishing Processes.

2) whether the metadata is consistent with the uploaded data files

We will check the consistency between metadata and data files uploaded, including their content, number of files, number of data entries, data volume, etc.

3) whether the data submitted is sufficiently intelligible

Data submission are considered as intelligible when, as a standalone entity, the data sufficiently describes the background and spatio-temporal span of data collection, the method of data generation, the device or computational model used, data accuracy, error range, etc.

Data depositors are required to provide all access information (e.g., DOI, CSTR) to facilitate the reader understanding whenever other academic sources (e.g., data, GitHub projects, softwares, referenced articles) or associated resource entities (e.g., derived data products) are used for data production.

Metadata should be a sufficient, clear and accurate description of the data.

We recommend data depositors to use descriptive file names, giving data files names that are concise but indicative of their content.

4) whether the data submitted is complete

We will check data integrity, including not only the integrity of the data but also the units of measurement. In case of incomplete or missing data, we ask data depositors to briefly describe and explicate the case in Data Description.

5) whether the data submitted is accessible

We will check whether any data files are damaged and whether they can be accessed. Whether the uncommon formats can be opened by the software indicated in Data Description.

ScienceDB recommends that data depositors refer to the relevant principles and recommendations in the “Preferred File Format” to organize data.

6) whether the data submitted contains sensitive content

For the data submission involving sensitive information, whether the submission of desensitization statement and other materials is complete.

7) whether the submission meets relevant codes of ethics

We will check relevant documents or certificates when a data relates to a potential ethical issue.

8) whether the submission contains descriptions about the scientific value and reusability of the data

In the Dataset description section, data depositors are required to briefly describe the scientific value and reusability of their data submissions.

ScienceDB provides various data license agreements, including 7 general license agreements: CC0, CC-BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY-NC 4.0, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, CC BY-ND 4.0, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, and 3 licenses for database: PDDL, ODC-By, ODbL, as well as 12 software license agreements: MIT, Apache-2.0, AGPL-3.0, LGPL-2.1, GPL-2.0, GPL-3.0, BSD-2-Clause, BSD-3-Clause, MPL-2.0, BSL-1.0, EPL-2.0 and The Unlicense. In addition, ScienceDB provides Restricted Access mode to data files. Data depositors can customize data access conditions. Please click here for the detailed introduction of the “Restricted Access” mode.

For more information on license agreements, please refer to FAQ: What license agreements does ScienceDB support?

ScienceDB supports a variety of data citation format such as GB/T 7714-2015. Users can choose the citation format by themselves.

ScienceDB provides relevant published paper information and related citation recommendations for the published data. ScienceDB does not require users to cite related publications while citing data, but users are requested to cite relevant publications according to actual conditions and academic practice to show respect and recognition for the data authors’ contributions.

All data published on ScienceDB are assigned a DOI and a CSTR, both of which are permanent identifiers. Published data can only be retracted in case of major data errors or academic misconduct, in which case only data files will be retracted while the metadata remains accessible.

For more information on data retraction, please refer to “FAQ: Can I retract a published data?"

The overall data policies of ScienceDB abide by the Terms of Service of the site.

(Last update: March 1, 2022)