Étiquette : scientific data

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Open by default: a proposed copyright license and waiver agreement for open access research and data in peer-reviewed journals

Copyright and licensing of scientific data, internationally, are complex and present legal barriers to data sharing, integration and reuse, and therefore restrict the most efficient transfer and discovery of scientific knowledge. Much data are included within scientific journal articles, their published tables, additional files (supplementary material) and reference lists. However, these data are usually published under licenses which are not appropriate for data.

Creative Commons CC0 is an appropriate and increasingly accepted method for dedicating data to the public domain, to enable data reuse with the minimum of restrictions. BioMed Central is committed to working towards implementation of open data-compliant licensing in its publications. Here we detail a protocol for implementing a combined Creative Commons Attribution license (for copyrightable material) and Creative Commons CC0 waiver (for data) agreement for content published in peer-reviewed open access journals.

We explain the differences between legal requirements for attribution in copyright, and cultural requirements in scholarship for giving individuals credit for their work through citation. We argue that publishing data in scientific journals under CC0 will have numerous benefits for individuals and society, and yet will have minimal implications for authors and minimal impact on current publishing and research workflows.

We provide practical examples and definitions of data types, such as XML and tabular data, and specific secondary use cases for published data, including text mining, reproducible research, and open bibliography. We believe this proposed change to the current copyright and licensing structure in science publishing will help clarify what users — people and machines — of the published literature can do, legally, with journal articles and make research using the published literature more efficient.

We further believe this model could be adopted across multiple publishers, and invite comment on this article from all stakeholders in scientific research.

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1756-0500/5/494/abstract

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The data paper: a mechanism to incentivize data publishing in biodiversity science

Background

Free and open access to primary biodiversity data is essential for informed decision-making to achieve conservation of biodiversity and sustainable development. However, primary biodiversity data are neither easily accessible nor discoverable.

Among several impediments, one is a lack of incentives to data publishers for publishing of their data resources. One such mechanism currently lacking is recognition through conventional scholarly publication of enriched metadata, which should ensure rapid discovery of ‘fit-for-use’ biodiversity data resources.

Discussion

We review the state of the art of data discovery options and the mechanisms in place for incentivizing data publishers efforts towards easy, efficient and enhanced publishing, dissemination, sharing and re-use of biodiversity data.

We propose the establishment of the ‘biodiversity data paper’ as one possible mechanism to offer scholarly recognition for efforts and investment by data publishers in authoring rich metadata and publishing them as citable academic papers.

While detailing the benefits to data publishers, we describe the objectives, work flow and outcomes of the pilot project commissioned by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility in collaboration with scholarly publishers and pioneered by Pensoft Publishers through its journals Zookeys, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, BioRisk, NeoBiota, Nature Conservation and the forthcoming Biodiversity Data Journal.

We then debate further enhancements of the data paper beyond the pilot project and attempt to forecast the future uptake of data papers as an incentivization mechanism by the stakeholder communities.

Conclusions

We believe that in addition to recognition for those involved in the data publishing enterprise, data papers will also expedite publishing of fit-for-use biodiversity data resources.

However, uptake and establishment of the data paper as a potential mechanism of scholarly recognition requires a high degree of commitment and investment by the cross-sectional stakeholder communities.”

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/12/S15/S2

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Science as an open enterprise The Science…

Science as an open enterprise :

“The Science as an open enterprise report highlights the need to grapple with the huge deluge of data created by modern technologies in order to preserve the principle of openness and to exploit data in ways that have the potential to create a second open science revolution.
Exploring massive amounts of data using modern digital technologies has enormous potential for science and its application in public policy and business. The report maps out the changes that are required by scientists, their institutions and those that fund and support science if this potential is to be realised.”

URL : http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/policy/projects/sape/2012-06-20-SAOE.pdf

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The Anatomy of a Data Citation: Discovery, Reuse, and Credit

INTRODUCTION

Data citation should be a necessary corollary of data publication and reuse. Many researchers are reluctant to share their data, yet they are increasingly encouraged to do just that.

Reward structures must be in place to encourage data publication, and citation is the appropriate tool for scholarly acknowledgment. Data citation also allows for the identification, retrieval, replication, and verification of data underlying published studies.

METHODS

This study examines author behavior and sources of instruction in disciplinary and cultural norms for writing style and citation via a content analysis of journal articles, author instructions, style manuals, and data publishers. Instances of data citation are benchmarked against a Data Citation Adequacy Index.

RESULTS

Roughly half of journals point toward a style manual that addresses data citation, but the majority of journal articles failed to include an adequate citation to data used in secondary analysis studies.

DISCUSSION

Full citation of data is not currently a normative behavior in scholarly writing. Multiplicity of data types and lack of awareness regarding existing standards contribute to the problem.

CONCLUSION

Citations for data must be promoted as an essential component of data publication, sharing, and reuse. Despite confounding factors, librarians and information professionals are well-positioned and should persist in advancing data citation as a normative practice across domains.

Doing so promotes a value proposition for data sharing and secondary research broadly, thereby accelerating the pace of scientific research.”

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss1/6/

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Willingness to Share Research Data Is Related to…

Willingness to Share Research Data Is Related to the Strength of the Evidence and the Quality of Reporting of Statistical Results :

“Background : The widespread reluctance to share published research data is often hypothesized to be due to the authors’ fear that reanalysis may expose errors in their work or may produce conclusions that contradict their own. However, these hypotheses have not previously been studied systematically.

Methods and Findings : We related the reluctance to share research data for reanalysis to 1148 statistically significant results reported in 49 papers published in two major psychology journals. We found the reluctance to share data to be associated with weaker evidence (against the null hypothesis of no effect) and a higher prevalence of apparent errors in the reporting of statistical results. The unwillingness to share data was particularly clear when reporting errors had a bearing on statistical significance.

Conclusions : Our findings on the basis of psychological papers suggest that statistical results are particularly hard to verify when reanalysis is more likely to lead to contrasting conclusions. This highlights the importance of establishing mandatory data archiving policies.”

URL : http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026828
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026828

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Costs and Benefits of Data Provision Over…

Costs and Benefits of Data Provision :

“Over the last decade there has been increasing awareness of the potential benefits of more open access to Public Sector Information (PSI) and the findings of publicly funded research. That awareness is based on economic principles and evidence, and it finds expression in policy at institutional, national and international levels.

Public Sector Information (PSI) policies seek to optimise innovation by making data available for use and re-use with minimal barriers in the form of cost or inconvenience. They place three responsibilities on publicly funded agencies: (i) to arrange stewardship and curation of their data; (ii) to make their data readily discoverable and available for use and re-use with minimal restrictions; and (iii) to forgo fees wherever practical.

This report presents case studies exploring the costs and benefits that PSI producing agencies and their users experience in making information freely available, and preliminary estimates of the wider economic impacts of open access to PSI. In doing so, it outlines a possibly method for cost-benefit analysis at the agency level and explores the data requirements for such an analysis – recognising that few agencies will have all of the data required.”

URL : http://ands.org.au/resource/houghton-cost-benefit-study.pdf

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Linking to Data Effect on Citation Rates in…

Linking to Data – Effect on Citation Rates in Astronomy :

“Is there a difference in citation rates between articles that were published with links to data and articles that were not? Besides being interesting from a purely academic point of view, this question is also highly relevant for the process of furthering science. Data sharing not only helps the process of verification of claims, but also the discovery of new findings in archival data. However, linking to data still is a far cry away from being a “practice”, especially where it comes to authors providing these links during the writing and submission process. You need to have both a willingness and a publication mechanism in order to create such a practice. Showing that articles with links to data get higher citation rates might increase the willingness of scientists to take the extra steps of linking data sources to their publications. In this presentation we will show this is indeed the case: articles with links to data result in higher citation rates than articles without such links. The ADS is funded by NASA Grant NNX09AB39G.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3618