  To improve the quality and efficiency of research, groups within the
scientific community seek to exploit the value of data sharing. Funders,
institutions, and specialist organizations are developing and implementing
strategies to encourage or mandate data sharing within and across disciplines,
with varying degrees of success. Academic journals in ecology and evolution
have adopted several types of public data archiving policies requiring authors
to make data underlying scholarly manuscripts freely available. Yet anecdotes
from the community and studies evaluating data availability suggest that these
policies have not obtained the desired effects, both in terms of quantity and
quality of available datasets. We conducted a qualitative, interview-based
study with journal editorial staff and other stakeholders in the academic
publishing process to examine how journals enforce data archiving policies. We
specifically sought to establish who editors and other stakeholders perceive as
responsible for ensuring data completeness and quality in the peer review
process. Our analysis revealed little consensus with regard to how data
archiving policies should be enforced and who should hold authors accountable
for dataset submissions. Themes in interviewee responses included hopefulness
that reviewers would take the initiative to review datasets and trust in
authors to ensure the completeness and quality of their datasets. We highlight
problematic aspects of these thematic responses and offer potential starting
points for improvement of the public data archiving process.
