Varsha Khodiyar, Data Curation Editor, Scientific Data, writes on behalf of the journal to announce that the UK Data Service’s ReShare online data repository for the archiving and sharing of research data is now an officially recommended repository for Scientific Data and the Nature Publishing Group.
How does it work?
Scientific Data primarily publishes Data Descriptors, a new type of scientific publication designed to promote an in-depth understanding of research datasets. A Data Descriptor is a peer-reviewed article that describes and links to scientifically valuable datasets. Data Descriptors combine traditional scientific article content with structured information curated in-house, designed to maximise data reuse and enable searching, linking and data-mining. Data Descriptors provide curated descriptions of valuable data that may otherwise be under-utilised by the scientific community. Researchers who have deposited their data in ReShare can prepare a Data Descriptor and submit it to Scientific Data.
What are the benefits for researchers?
- There are a number of reasons why an increasing number of scientists are deciding to take this important extra step:
- Citable, peer-reviewed credit for their dataset
- Enhanced discoverability of their work through exposure on Nature.com
- Publication of valuable datasets that may not be well suited for traditional research journals
- Recognition to researchers who may not qualify for authorship of traditional articles, supporting all stages of the research career
What are the potential benefits for knowledge exchange and impact?
The publication of Data Descriptors is still not standard, but is growing and means that social science and humanities research can now be more discoverable in a multidisciplinary resource, enabling more research data to be discovered by more researchers and reused in more innovative ways.
Not just for the research community
Scientific Data welcomes data from all areas of science under an open access policy, which ensures articles are made freely available online and exposed to the widest possible audience. ReShare allows authors the option of publishing their data either as fully open data or as safeguarded data made available under the UK Data Service’s End User Licence. Therefore this collaboration with Scientific Data gives social science and humanities researchers the opportunity to increase the discoverability of their dataset via submission of a Data Descriptor, whilst maintaining UK Data Service’s level of safeguarding research subjects.
As part of the research process, it is likely researchers already have all the information needed to prepare a Data Descriptor. There is no need to move data from ReShare to publish. Scientific Data is an open access journal, please see our information on licensing and publication charges.