Publishing guidelines for researchers

When using confidential data provided by the Data Services Branch, you must:

• ensure that any published data are only presented in aggregate tables or as part of an analysis of the data;
• ensure that any published data are not likely to enable the identification of any individual person or organisation and that the principles outlined in the national Guidelines for Use and Disclosure of Health Data for Statistical Purposes are adhered to in any publications arising from the data;
• provide to the Data Services Branch (DLQ@health.qld.gov.au), for noting and/or review at least one month prior to publication, any draft publications arising from data provided or linked by the Data Services Branch. All manuscripts utilising Data Services Branch datasets and/or linkage services should appropriately acknowledge the Data Service Branch;
• make available, on request and without charge, copies of any publication or other release of the results of analyses to the Data Services Branch;
• provide to the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages (M-BDMDMS@justice.qld.gov.au) any draft publications involving death registration data or cause of death data three months prior to publication for their review;
• ensure that any counts of records from the Cause of Death Unit Record File between 1 and 5 inclusive are published as ≤5;
• ensure that no extract, derivation, or aggregation of these data which may enable the identification of a discrete non-urban Indigenous community is released to any third party or included in any published reports without the prior approval of the Data Services Branch;

It is important to note that Data Services Branch will review your manuscript from the perspective of the technical aspects of data linkage (such as references to methodology) and governance considerations.  The Data Services Branch does not perform a clinical review of your manuscript (see the note below if you so wish to seek clinical expertise for your project).  The analysis and conclusions contained in your draft publication are out of scope of the Data Services Branch review.

If you have had an article accepted for publication based on a research project involving Information given by Queensland Health, please provide a preprint of your article as soon as it is available to PHA@health.qld.gov.au prior to publishing the article/s. Please note you may wish to access Queensland Health clinical experts for your project (for example, as peer reviewers). If so, please contact CEQCorro@health.qld.gov.au.