Data publishing (also data publication) is the act of releasing
research data
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted. ...
in
published form for use by others. It is a practice consisting in preparing certain
data
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted ...
or
data set A data set (or dataset) is a collection of data. In the case of tabular data, a data set corresponds to one or more database tables, where every column of a table represents a particular variable, and each row corresponds to a given record of the ...
(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.
The main goal is to elevate data to be first class research outputs.
There are a number of initiatives underway as well as points of consensus and issues still in contention.
There are several distinct ways to make research data available, including:
* publishing data as supplemental material associated with a
research article
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publ ...
, typically with the data files hosted by the publisher of the article
* hosting data on a publicly available website, with files available for download
* hosting data in a repository that has been developed to support data publication, e.g.
figshare
Figshare is an online open access repository where researchers can preserve and share their research outputs, including figures, datasets, images, and videos. It is free to upload content and free to access, in adherence to the principle of open ...
,
Dryad
A dryad (; el, Δρυάδες, ''sing''.: ) is a tree nymph or tree spirit in Greek mythology. ''Drys'' (δρῦς) signifies "oak" in Greek, and dryads were originally considered the nymphs of oak trees specifically, but the term has evolved to ...
,
Dataverse
The Dataverse is an open source web application to share, preserve, cite, explore and analyze research data. Researchers, data authors, publishers, data distributors, and affiliated institutions all receive appropriate credit via a data citation w ...
,
Zenodo
Zenodo is a general-purpose open repository developed under the European OpenAIRE program and operated by CERN.
It allows researchers to deposit research papers, data sets, research software, reports, and any other research related digital artef ...
. A large number of general and specialty (such as by research topic) data repositories exist.
For example, the
UK Data Service
The UK Data Service is the largest digital repository for quantitative and qualitative social science and humanities research data in the United Kingdom. The organisation is funded by the UK government through the Economic and Social Research C ...
enables users to deposit data collections and re-share these for research purposes.
* publishing a data paper about the dataset, which may be published as a preprint, in a regular
journal
A journal, from the Old French ''journal'' (meaning "daily"), may refer to:
*Bullet journal, a method of personal organization
*Diary, a record of what happened over the course of a day or other period
*Daybook, also known as a general journal, a ...
, or in a data journal that is dedicated to supporting data papers. The data may be hosted by the journal or hosted separately in a data repository.
Publishing data allows researchers to both make their data available to others to use, and enables datasets to be cited similarly to other research publication types (such as articles or books), thereby enabling producers of datasets to gain academic credit for their work.
The motivations for publishing data may range for a desire to make research more accessible, to enable citability of datasets, or research funder or publisher mandates that require open data publishing. The UK Data Service is one key organisation working with others to raise the importance of citing data correctly and helping researchers to do so.
Solutions to preserve privacy within data publishing has been proposed, including privacy protection algorithms, data ”masking” methods, and regional privacy level calculation algorithm.
Methods for publishing data
Data files as supplementary material
A large number of journals and publishers support supplementary material being attached to research articles, including datasets. Though historically such material might have been distributed only by request or on
microform
Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original document size. F ...
to libraries, journals today typically host such material online. Supplementary material is available to subscribers to the journal or, if the article or journal is open access, to everyone.
Data repositories
There are a large number of data repositories, on both general and specialized topics. Many repositories are
disciplinary repositories
A disciplinary repository (or subject repository) is an online archive containing works or data associated with these works of scholars in a particular subject area. Disciplinary repositories can accept work from scholars from any institution. A ...
, focused on a particular research discipline such as the
UK Data Service
The UK Data Service is the largest digital repository for quantitative and qualitative social science and humanities research data in the United Kingdom. The organisation is funded by the UK government through the Economic and Social Research C ...
which is a trusted digital repository of social, economic and humanities data. Repositories may be free for researchers to upload their data or may charge a one-time or ongoing fee for hosting the data. These repositories offer a publicly accessible web interface for searching and browsing hosted datasets, and may include additional features such as a
digital object identifier
A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to uniquely identify various objects, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). DOIs are an implementation of the Handle System; they a ...
, for permanent citation of the data, and linking to associated published papers and code.
Data papers
Data papers or data articles 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”.
Their final aim is to provide “information on the what, where, why, how and who of the data”.
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.
Because data papers are considered academic publications no different than other types of papers, they allow scientists sharing data to receive credit in currency recognizable within the academic system, thus "making data sharing count".
This provides not only an additional incentive to share data, but also through the
peer review
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...
process, increases the quality of metadata and thus reusability of the shared data.
Thus data papers represent the
scholarly communication
Scholarly communication involves the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of academic research, primarily in peer-reviewed journals and books. It is “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evalu ...
approach to
data sharing
Data sharing is the practice of making data used for scholarly research available to other investigators. Many funding agencies, institutions, and publication venues have policies regarding data sharing because transparency and openness are consid ...
. 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.
Data journals
Data papers are supported by a rich array of data 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.
A non-exhaustive list of data journals has been compiled by staff at the University of Edinburgh.
Examples of "pure" data journals are: ''
Earth System Science Data'', ''
Journal of Open Archaeology Data'', ''
Open Health Data
Open or OPEN may refer to:
Music
* Open (band), Australian pop/rock band
* The Open (band), English indie rock band
* Open (Blues Image album), ''Open'' (Blues Image album), 1969
* Open (Gotthard album), ''Open'' (Gotthard album), 1999
* Open (C ...
'', ''
Polar Data Journal
Polar may refer to:
Geography
Polar may refer to:
* Geographical pole, either of two fixed points on the surface of a rotating body or planet, at 90 degrees from the equator, based on the axis around which a body rotates
*Polar climate, the cli ...
'', and ''
Scientific Data
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete Value_(semiotics), values that convey information, describing quantity, qualitative property, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of sy ...
''.
Examples of "mixed" journals publishing data papers are: ''
Biodiversity Data Journal
Biodiversity or biological diversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth. Biodiversity is a measure of variation at the genetic ('' genetic variability''), species (''species diversity''), and ecosystem ('' ecosystem diversity'') ...
'', ''
F1000Research
F1000 (formerly "Faculty of 1000") is an open research publisher for scientists, scholars, and clinical researchers. F1000 offers a different research evaluation service from standard academic journals by offering peer-review after, rather than ...
'', ''
GigaScience
''GigaScience'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that was established in 2012. It covers research and large data-sets that result from work in the biomedical and life sciences. The editor-in-chief is Scott Edmunds. Originally, the journal wa ...
'', ''
GigaByte
The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix ''giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB.
This defini ...
'', ''
PLOS ONE'', and ''
SpringerPlus''.
Data citation
![Data Dryad citation on Wikipedia](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Data_Dryad_citation_on_Wikipedia.png)
Data citation is the provision of accurate, consistent and standardised referencing for
datasets just as bibliographic
citation
A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of ...
s are provided for other published sources like
research article
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publ ...
s or
monograph
A monograph is a specialist work of writing (in contrast to reference works) or exhibition on a single subject or an aspect of a subject, often by a single author or artist, and usually on a scholarly subject.
In library cataloging, ''monograph ...
s. Typically the well established
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) approach is used with DOIs taking users to a
website
A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...
that contains the
metadata
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
on the dataset and the dataset itself.
History of development
A 2011 paper reported an inability to determine how often data citation happened in social sciences.
2012-13 papers reported that data citation was becoming more common but the practice for it was not standard.
In 2014
FORCE 11 published the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles covering the purpose, function and attributes of data citation.
In October 2018
CrossRef expressed its support for cataloging datasets and recommending their citation.
A popular data-oriented journal reported in April 2019 that it would now use data citations.
A June 2019 paper suggested that increased data citation will make the practice more valuable for everyone by encouraging data sharing and also by increasing the prestige of people who share.
Data citation is an emerging topic in
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...
and it has been defined as a computational problem.
Indeed, citing data poses significant challenges to computer scientists and the main problems to address are related to:
* the use of heterogeneous data models and formats – e.g., relational databases, Comma-Separated Values (CSV),
Extensible Markup Language
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...
(XML),
Resource Description Framework The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of ...
(RDF);
* the transience of data;
* the necessity to cite data at different levels of coarseness – i.e., deep citations;
* the necessity to automatically generate citations to data with variable granularity.
See also
*
Data archiving
Research data archiving is the long-term storage of scholarly research data, including the natural sciences, social sciences, and life sciences. The various academic journals have differing policies regarding how much of their data and methods res ...
*
Disciplinary repository
A disciplinary repository (or subject repository) is an online archive containing works or data associated with these works of scholars in a particular subject area. Disciplinary repositories can accept work from scholars from any institution. A ...
*
Open science data Open scientific data or open research data is a type of open data focused on publishing observations and results of scientific activities available for anyone to analyze and reuse. A major purpose of the drive for open data is to allow the verificat ...
*
Registry of Research Data Repositories
The Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data.org) is an open science tool that offers researchers, funding organizations, libraries and publishers an overview of existing international repositories for research data.
Background
re3da ...
References
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[Australian National Data Service: Data Citation Awareness](_blank)
(Accessed 20 March 2012)
[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/]
[Silvello, G. (2018). 'Theory and Practice of Data Citation'. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) (AIS Review), vol. 69 issue 1, pp. 6-20, 2018. Available online (open access): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/asi.23917]
[Buneman, P. and Silvello, G. (2010). 'A Rule-Based Citation System for Structured and Evolving Datasets'. IEEE Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 3. IEEE Computer Society, pp. 33-41, September 2010. Available online: http://sites.computer.org/debull/A10sept/buneman.pdf]
[Silvello, G. (2017). 'Learning to Cite Framework: How to Automatically Construct Citations for Hierarchical Data'. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Volume 68 issue 6, pp. 1505-1524, June 2017. Available online: http://www.dei.unipd.it/~silvello/papers/2016-DataCitation-JASIST-Silvello.pdf]
[Silvello, G. (2015). 'A Methodology for Citing Linked Open Data Subsets'. D-Lib Magazine 21 (1/2), 2015. Available online: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january15/silvello/01silvello.html]
[Buneman, P. (2006). 'How to Cite Curated Databases and how to Make Them Citable'. In Proc. of the 18th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, SSDBM 2006, pages 195–203, 2006.]
{{Data
Academic publishing
Open access (publishing)
Data
Open science
Scholarly communication