The American Economic Association (AEA) shares replication packages (data and code) through a newly established AEA Data and Code Repository at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). In 2019, the AEA adopted a revised Data and Code Availability Policy “to improve the reproducibility and transparency of materials supporting research published in the AEA journals.” The revised policy introduced pre-publication verification of reproducibility by a dedicated data editor team, and moved replication packages to ICPSR for greater transparency and visibility than was previously possible. The AEA initiative is one of the most comprehensive reproducibility and data/code sharing initiatives in the social sciences.
Each data collection published in the AEA Data and Code Repository receives a persistent digital identifier (DOI), as well as descriptive metadata to increase findability, including JEL codes and subject terms. Data collections are also linked back to the journal article.
Additionally, the AEA migrated their entire back archive of more than 3,000 data and code supplements to the AEA Data and Code Repository at ICPSR. This represents almost two decades of required data sharing associated with AEA journal publications.