Data paper

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”.[1] Their final aim being to provide “information on the what, where, why, how and who of the data”.[2] 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.[3]

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.[4]

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 [5] A preprint is available on ResearchGate

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.

A non-exhaustive list of data journals has been compiled by staff at the University of Edinburgh.[6] Another one is that accompanying the survey mentioned above and available on ResearchGate

See also

References

  1. ↑ 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.
  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.
  3. ↑ Newman Paul & Corke Peter. "Data papers — peer reviewed publication of high quality data sets". International Journal of Robotics Research 28 (5): 587–587. doi:10.1177/0278364909104283.
  4. ↑ Parsons, M.A. and Fox, P.A. (2013). "Is data publication the right metaphor?". Data Science Journal 12: WDS31–WDS46.
  5. ↑ Candela, L., Castelli, D., Manghi, P. and Tani, A. (2015). "Data Journals: A Survey". Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology n.a.: n.a. doi:10.1002/asi.23358.
  6. ↑ https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/datashare/Sources+of+dataset+peer+review