In their commentary, Székely et al. (SA) question our publication of a long-term dataset on threatened Snowy Plovers Charadrius nivosus breeding at Bahía de Ceuta, Mexico. The commentary was submitted to Scientific Data but rejected by the editors, who based on the reports of two reviewers concluded that our data descriptor had reasonably acknowledged prior work and was written scientifically ethical and suitable given the limitations of the publication’s format. Most importantly, we note that SA do not raise any fault with the main content of the paper – the data and their accompanying description – providing further assurance that these data can be analysed or reanalysed with confidence. However, SA write that the data descriptor has “omissions and inaccurate statements, and fails to acknowledge key contributions to their project”. We reject these criticisms and maintain that i) we were within our full rights to publish these data and, ii) the data descriptor is accurate.