Publication and Dissemination Policy

This policy applies to any outputs that form part of original research that is submitted for publication to journals or made publicly viewable in the form of pre-prints or reports made available on public repositories, such as Zenodo. Researchers are also expected to adhere to any additional policies or guidelines for specific programmes of which their work is part e.g. CVD-COVID-UK and HDR UK’s Good Research Practice Policy.

Manuscript publication

The BHF Data Science Centre advocates open and unrestricted access to published research and mandates that publications resulting from the research it supports must be made available publicly and freely. This includes research articles supported in whole or in part by the BHF Data Science Centre through funding, being part of any consortium or utilising infrastructure coordinated by the BHF Data Science Centre or where any author is listed as being affiliated to the BHF Data Science Centre.

All research articles must be made publicly and freely available via Europe PMC within 6 months of the final publication date

It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to ensure the article is deposited into Europe PMC (either by the journal or themselves) and to secure funding for open access fees. If you are unable to secure open access funding, please contact the BHF Data Science Centre for advice, however any support would be provided at our discretion.

The following statement must be included in the publication:

This work was supported by the British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre (grant SP/19/3/34678); awarded to Health Data Research UK.

The following affiliation should be used:

British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre, Health Data Research UK, London, UK.

The BHF Data Science Centre also recommends that:

  • Authors publish research articles with a Creative Commons attribution license (CC-BY). A CC-BY license, while requiring attribution to the author(s), permits a broad range of future uses (including commercial and derivative products) without the requirement of seeking prior permission from the author(s).

Any exceptions to this policy must be highlighted to the BHF Data Science Centre Operations Director (email bhfdsc@hdruk.ac.uk) before publication.

Data, code and materials

All research articles must include a statement explaining how other researchers can access any data, original code and related digital artefacts or materials underpinning the research (often known as a Data Access or Data Availability Statement). Where an appropriate public repository exists, it is expected that data or materials will be submitted to the appropriate repository and the relevant accession identifier or digital object identifier (DOI) included in the publication.

The BHF Data Science Centre also recommends that:

  • All data outputs, such as software, code and algorithms be uploaded to the BHF Data Science Centre GitHub repository.
  • All data outputs, such as code, analytical script, software and algorithms be made available via an open permissive licence (such as Apache Licence 2.0, MIT, MPL or BSD), permitting anyone to benefit from, improve upon and redistribute the code.
  • Phenotyping algorithms and code lists be submitted to HDR UK’s Phenotype Library.

Pre-prints

The BHF Data Science Centre are supportive of researchers posting preprints of their completed manuscripts with a Creative Commons attribution (CC-BY) license on a platform that is indexed in Europe PMC.

Authorship

The BHF Data Science Centre expects the contributions of each and every person contributing to the work to be fairly represented in authorship or acknowledgements. This includes patient and public contributors, and public and patients who provide their data to help advance medical research. We encourage the use of CASRAI1’s Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) system or following the ICMJE recommendations, where possible.

Communication and support

The BHF Data Science Centre are keen to support publication and external communication of outputs, including web stories, social media, or press. Please contact us at bhfdsc@hdruk.ac.uk at the point of manuscript submission – if not before – to let us know if you would like us to support publicising your findings.

If your home institute prepares a press release about research we have enabled, the BHF Data Science Centre should be referenced in the body of the release (or the Editor’s Notes, depending on the level of support). Our communications team should have sight of the press release before it is distributed. Please ask your press office to email bhfdsc@hdruk.ac.uk and comms@hdruk.ac.uk in this instance.

The Centre should be cited as ‘the British Heart Foundation (BHF) Data Science Centre at Health Data Research UK (HDR UK).’ Please email bhfdsc@hdruk.ac.uk for any queries around this.