An editorial this week in Scientific Data discusses the systems that are emerging for authors to be able to deposit clinical datasets – such as the Yale Open Data Access (YODA, http://yoda.yale.edu/) Project and Clinical Study Data Request (CSDR, https://www.clinicalstudydatarequest.com/), as well as Scientific Data itself (http://go.nature.com/rlZ4ny).

The editorial also makes mention of draft guidelines, entitled ‘Publishing descriptions of non-public clinical datasets: guidance for researchers, repositories, editors and funding organisations’, which were developed with input and feedback from a working group including representatives from several pharmaceutical companies, research funders and the YODA and CSDR initiatives.

These guidelines are currently open for public comment until September 7th, 2015 – and will ultimately be published in a peer review journal.