What are the policy requirements for USGS authors regarding use of "unpublished data" or "personal communication" (including written, oral or verbal communication) when citing data used to support scholarly publications? [177]

In accordance with the USGS Public Access Plan, effective October 1, 2016, all supporting digital research data approved for release for final accepted manuscripts or final publications must be freely available for public access at the same time as or before the official publication date. Exceptions are allowed for special circumstances such as location data for endangered species or location data pertaining to homeland security or privacy issues as well as data mentioned in the text but not used as a basis for the conclusions. Thus, the use of "unpublished data" or "personal (written, oral, or verbal) communication" will no longer be permitted for in-text citations when USGS authors refer to data used to support the results and conclusions in their scholarly publications. However, citations referring to unpublished data are allowed when the citation refers to examples that support or contradict findings but are not imperative to the results and conclusions of the publication. Citations referring to written communications are allowed to identify the source of data included in a data table that is part of a publication or in a data release associated with a publication. By doing this, the author is identifying where and how the data originated (name, affiliation, written commun., date).