Research data policies of journals in the Chinese Science Citation Database based on the language, publisher, discipline, access model and metrics

This article investigates the research data policies of China's scholarly journals to provide a regional perspective. In total, 1243 science, technology, and medicine (STM) journals in the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD) were examined in June and July of 2021. The findings show that the existence and attitudinal strength of the research data policies of China's scholarly journals are weak overall, but differences exist across journals with different languages, publishers, disciplines, access models and metrics. A large imbalance exists between English-language journals and Chinese-language journals in setting their research data policies. The existence and attitudinal strength of the research data policies of journals co-published by Western publishers and Chinese publishers are much stronger than those of journals published solely by Chinese publishers. In terms of discipline, journals belonging to the life sciences have stronger attitudes towards research data sharing. Open access model journals and hybrid model journals are better than subscription model journals in opening and sharing research data. The higher the impact factor (IF) and CiteScore of a journal, the more likely the journal is to have data policies.