Peer review of publications is at the core of science and primarily seen as instrument for ensuring research quality. However, it is less common to independently value the quality of the underlying data as well.
In the light of the ‘data deluge’ it makes sense to extend peer review to the data itself and this way evaluate the degree to which the data are fit for re-use. This paper describes a pilot study at EASY – the electronic archive for (open) research data at our institution.
In EASY, researchers can archive their data and add metadata themselves. Devoted to open access and data sharing, at the archive we are interested in further enriching these metadata with peer reviews.
As a pilot, we established a workflow where researchers who have downloaded data sets from the archive were asked to review the downloaded data set. This paper describes the details of the pilot including the findings, both quantitative and qualitative.
Finally, we discuss issues that need to be solved when such a pilot is turned into a structural peer review functionality for the archiving system.