Data publishing

Data publishing (also data publication) is the act of releasing data in published form for (re)use by others. It is a practice consisting in preparing certain data or data set(s) for public use thus to make them available to everyone to use as they wish. This practice is an integral part of the open science movement. There is a large and multidisciplinary consensus on the benefits resulting from this practice.[1] [2] [3]

The main goal is to elevate data to be first class research outputs.[4] There are a number of initiatives underway as well as points of consensus and issues still in contention.[5]

However, publishers supported data publishing/publication either as an integral part of the paper or as supplemental material published jointly with the paper. These approaches are affected from a number of drawbacks from the data publication perspective including the difficulties in separating the data from the rest.

Data publishing/publication is a practice on its own:

Data papers

Data papers are “scholarly publication of a searchable metadata document describing a particular on-line accessible dataset, or a group of datasets, published in accordance to the standard academic practices”.[7] Their final aim being to provide “information on the what, where, why, how and who of the data”.[4] The intent of a data paper is to offer descriptive information on the related dataset(s) focusing on data collection, distinguishing features, access and potential reuse rather than on data processing and analysis.[8]

Thus data papers represent the scholarly communication approach to data sharing.

Despite their potentiality, data papers are not the ultimate and complete solution for all the data sharing and reuse issues and, in some cases, they are considered to induce false expectations in the research community.[9]

Data journals

Data papers are supported by a rich array of journals, some of which are "pure", i.e. they are dedicated to publish data papers only, while others – the majority – are "mixed", i.e. they publish a number of articles types including data papers.

A comprehensive survey on data journals is available [10] A non-exhaustive list of data journals has been compiled by staff at the University of Edinburgh.[11]

Examples of "pure" data journals are: Earth System Science Data, Scientific Data, Journal of Open Archaeology Data, and Open Health Data.

Examples of "mixed" journals publishing data papers are: SpringerPlus, PLOS ONE, Biodiversity Data Journal, F1000Research, and GigaScience.

Data citation

Data citation is the provision of accurate, consistent and standardised referencing for datasets just as bibliographic citations are provided for other published sources like research articles or monographs. Typically the well established Digital Object Identifier (DOI) approach is used with DOIs taking users to a website that contains the metadata on the dataset and the dataset itself.[12][13]

Several organizations have been established with the aim of driving the data citation agenda. These include the following:[14]

See also

References

  1. Costello MJ (2009). "Motivating online publication of data". BioScience 59 (5): 418–427. doi:10.1525/bio.2009.59.5.9.
  2. Smith VS (2009). "Data publication: towards a database of everything". BMC Research Notes 2 (113). doi:10.1186/1756-0500-2-113. PMC 2702265. PMID 19552813.
  3. Lawrence, B, Jones, C., Matthews, B., Pepler, S., Callaghan, S. (2011). "Citation and Peer Review of Data: Moving Towards Formal Data Publication". International Journal of Digital Curation 6 (2): 4–37. doi:10.2218/ijdc.v6i2.205.
  4. 1 2 Callaghan, S., Donegan, S., Pepler, S., Thorley, M., Cunningham, N., Kirsch, P., Ault, L., Bell, P., Bowie, R., Leadbetter, A., Lowry, R., Moncoiffé, G., Harrison, K., Smith-Haddon, B., Weatherby, A., & Wright, D. (2012). "Making data a first class scientific output: Data citation and publication by NERCs environmental data centres". International Journal of Digital Curation 7 (1): 107–113. doi:10.2218/ijdc.v7i1.218.
  5. Kratz J and Strasser C (2014). "Data publication consensus and controversies". F1000Research 3 (94). doi:10.12688/f1000research.4518.
  6. Assante, M., Candela, L., Castelli, D., Tani, A. (2016). "Are Scientific Data Repositories Coping with Research Data Publishing?". Data Science Journal 15. doi:10.5334/dsj-2016-006/.
  7. Chavan, V., & Penev, L. (2011). "The data paper: a mechanism to incentivize data publishing in biodiversity science". BMC Bioinformatics 12 (15). doi:10.1186/1471-2105-12-S15-S2.
  8. Newman Paul & Corke Peter (2009). "Data papers — peer reviewed publication of high quality data sets". International Journal of Robotics Research 28 (5): 587–587. doi:10.1177/0278364909104283.
  9. Parsons, M.A. and Fox, P.A. (2013). "Is data publication the right metaphor?". Data Science Journal 12: WDS31–WDS46.
  10. Candela, L., Castelli, D., Manghi, P. and Tani, A. (2015). "Data Journals: A Survey". Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66 (1): 1747–1762. doi:10.1002/asi.23358.
  11. https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/datashare/Sources+of+dataset+peer+review
  12. Australian National Data Service: Data Citation Awareness (Accessed 20 March 2012)
  13. Ball, A., Duke, M. (2011). ‘Data Citation and Linking’. DCC Briefing Papers. Edinburgh: Digital Curation Centre. Available online: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/briefing-papers/
  14. Data Citation Principles Workshop, May 16 - May 17, 2011, IQSS at Harvard University: Links (Accessed 20 March 2012)
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