In response to the growing interest in the availability of data associated with articles, PubMed Central (PMC) is reviewing current practices around data and seeking feedback on how to best serve the data needs of the research community.

As part of these efforts, the PMC policy statement on supplementary data was recently updated to more clearly articulate the requirement that any supplementary data (images, tables, video, or other documents / files) that are associated with an article must be deposited in PMC with an article. The search filter "has suppdata[filter]" can be used in PMC to discover records with associated supplementary data files.

In addition to providing supplementary data with an article, NLM is also encouraging journals and authors to make research data available in a public repository and to include the relevant data citation(s) in the paper. Guidance for PMC data providers on tagging data citations is available in the Tagging Guidelines. This guidance is based on the JATS4R recommendations on data citations.

Starting October 2017, the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system will also accept deposits of small datasets (2 GB or smaller) accompanying deposits of funded author manuscripts for inclusion of PMC. Guidance for authors is available in the NIHMS FAQ.

If you have suggestions on future directions in data for PMC to consider, please let us know at pubmedcentral@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.