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Scientific Data outreach in Japan

Scientific Data and Nature Publishing Group’s open data initiatives have been presented to Japanese audiences through several recent events.

59th annual meeting of Japanese Society of Human Genetics

On 22 November, a luncheon seminar was arranged during the 59th annual meeting of the Japanese Society of Human Genetics, co-sponsored by Japanese Society of Human Genetics (JSHG) and Nature Publishing Group. The seminar, ‘Scholarly Communication in Open Research era – open data and data deposition with example of Scientific Data and Human Genome Variation’, discussed trends in the open data movement that prompted the launch of two open access journals (Human Genome Variation is co-published by JSHG and Nature Publishing Group).

Dr. Hideya Kawaji, of RIKEN Preventive Medicine & Diagnosis Innovation Program (PMI) and RIKEN Advanced Center for Computing and Communication (ACCC), and an Editorial Board Member of Scientific Data, presented the journal at the event. Dr Kawaji’s excellent talk introduced Scientific Data’s key principles and the ‘Data Descriptor’, emphasizing the importance of data sharing for the advancement of science, in the context of his own research in genomics.

Download the slides

At the same event, Professor Naomichi Matsumoto, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Human Genetics, introduced new trends in genome research and databases, and Professor Katsushi Tokunaga, Editor-in-Chief of Human Genome Variation discussed how the journal has responded to a demand by the community for a place to publish important discoveries, observations and analysis about research on the human genome.

The speakers attracted a large audience, with 250 participants filling the seminar venue, and there were many discussions and questions during and after the seminar. The post-event questionnaire demonstrated that over 82% of participants found the seminar informative.

37th annual meeting of the Molecular Biology Society of Japan

During the 37th annual meeting of the Molecular Biology Society of Japan on 26 November 2014, we introduced Scientific Data at the Forum ‘Data-driven approaches to elucidate physiological metabolic machinery conserved across species’ to 60 researchers, which generated extensive discussion, especially among bioinformaticians. The presentation focused on a publisher’s perspective on data and reproducibility, and discussed the community and generalist data repositories recommended by Scientific Data.

Download the slides

Later in the conference, we held a ‘Meet the Editor’ session, inviting Dr. Kawaji who answered various questions from researchers, at the Scientific Data booth. Delegates’ questions included specific pre-submission queries and discussion around data curation and metadata, following Dr. Kawaji’s enlightening explanation on ISA-tools as one of the key features and author services of Scientific Data.

Finally, detailed information about the journal is now available in Japanese – an open access article introducing Scientific Data was published on December 1st. The article “Scientific Data: An open access and open data publication to facilitate reproducible research” available under CC BY license in Johokanri – Journal of Information Processing and Management, Vol. 57 (2014) No. 9 P629-640.

An English language pre-print version of this article has also been posted on Figshare. Read it here.

Written by Yoko Shintani

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