In a submitted manuscript, how (un)usual is a note "will be inserted in the final manuscript", or other meta-information to editor&reviewers?

Question

I'm about to submit a manuscript describing a data product. In the manuscript, I will advertise that the data are available for public use under the ODC Attribution license. After submission, I will start the process to transfer the data to the World Data Center for Remote Sensing of the Atmosphere, who would like to see a manuscript before I can transfer my data. But in the manuscript, I hope to have a persistent link, citing the actual data. So, I have a chicken-and-egg problem.

I could solve this by writing in the submitted manuscript a note This will be adapted in the final version. How usual or unusual is it to write such meta-information in a manuscript? Or should I rather not make mention of it in the initial submission, and rather communicate this meta-information to the reviewers via the editor?

Answer 1

I recently had a similar problem and submitted a paper including the sentence:

Data for the analysis has been submitted to Dryad (http://datadryad.org) with DOI: xxxxxxxx (Note: data will be uploaded at publication, during the review found in Appendix A).

The journal did not have any problem with this, and I have now recieved the reviews. However, I contacted the journal beforehand and asked about this, since Dryad only accepts data from papers that are published or in press. In this case I included the data as an extra, review-only, appendix, and the need for this will naturally depend on specific journal policies.

Only communicating this information to the editor (your last option) should also be fine. However, for the reviewers it can be useful to have the information in the actual manuscript when they are reading, instead of buried in an email from the editor.