We love Data! New Data Availability Statements on ScienceOpen
Robust data is at the heart of every research article. Increasingly, researchers are making great efforts to make their raw data and software available to other researchers as part of a move to more open and reproducible science. They are carefully managing data generation with new tools and storing digital research data in open data repositories or special subject repositories. But the heterogeneous and sometimes sensitive nature of data raises numerous hurdles. ScienceOpen has taken up the challenge by adding Data Availability Statements to all of its preprint and poster publications and as an additional metadata field for all articles on the site. If your data is open, share it with the world!
“Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.” (W. Edwards Deming)
Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Natasha Simons, Azhar Hussain and Simon Goudie as part of the Data Policy Standardisation and Implementation Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance recently published a set of data policy guidelines and standardized texts for data availability statements to support publishers and journals in creating a more consistent data landscape. In the preprint “Developing a research data policy framework for all journals and publishers”, 14 features are analysed ranging from repositories and data citation to licensing and peer review of data. Six tiers of data policies are defined with increasing levels of requirements and checks. The standardized texts should make it easy for publishers and journals to implement and communicate a data policy to their authors and readers.
UCL Press has spearheaded this development at ScienceOpen. They have added the new standardized data policy to their editorial guidelines (https://ucl-about.scienceopen.com/open-data) and made a data availability statement mandatory for manuscript upload to the innovative multi-disciplinary journal UCL Open: Environment. The fruitful collaboration between UCL Press and ScienceOpen continues to explore and develop new ways to work with the research community and support a shift to more open practices.
“With this project UCL Press is striving to develop best practices for rapid and open publishing in a digital environment. Data is an essential part of that process. We appreciate the guidance by the Data Policy Standardisation and Implementation Interest Group and hope that many publishers will be taking steps towards more uniform data policies. We will closely monitor the developments in this area in the coming year.”
Ian Caswell, UCL Press journals manager
Mandatory Data Availability Statements on ScienceOpen
Perfectly in time to celebrate the Love Data Week, ScienceOpen has expanded upon this collaboration by adding mandatory Data Availability Statements to all content uploaded to the site. Authors can indicate how fellow researchers can access their software and data and link to data sets in repositories. We also strongly encourage citing data in the reference list according to the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles.
But with over 61 million article records in its discovery environment, ScienceOpen can also do more! As a registered user you may add a Data Availability Statement to the metadata of any article that you have authored. If you have made your data available through an open repository, you can link it to your article record for easy access. Or perhaps you have written an article using a data set from another researcher – you can also link to that here. Even if data sharing is not applicable or the data is included in the published article or supplementary information files, this can be very helpful information for readers.
Contact us
If you are an author, you can enhance your articles with data information on ScienceOpen today. If you are a journal editor or publisher and thinking about migrating to a new platform, ScienceOpen would be happy to provide a demo of our cutting-edge technology. Just contact Stephanie Dawson or Stuart Cooper.
