Scientific Data’s content is now indexed by PubMed and freely available through PubMed Central (PMC), two interlinked services maintained by the US National Library of Medicine that are widely used by researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences. We have also been approved for indexing in the more selective MEDLINE database and our content will be progressively incorporated into MEDLINE in the near future.
Article deposition at PMC is required by major funders, including the Wellcome Trust and NIH. In support of these mandates, Nature Publishing Group has been depositing research content to PMC on behalf of authors since 2008. For fully open-access journals like Scientific Data, final versions of all articles are automatically deposited to PMC, regardless of funding source, upon publication.
One Year Ago
Nature Publishing Group launched Scientific Data, a unique peer-reviewed open-access journal for the description of scientifically valuable datasets – whatever their size or area of science. Motivated by the fact that datasets are rarely used to their full potential, we aimed to help researchers get the most from their data and created a new article type called a Data Descriptor.
Each Data Descriptor details how the data was collected, how it is useful and how it can be reused, helping link traditional research articles and data repositories.
Today
As we approach our first birthday, over 70 articles have been published, one of the highest outputs for a data journal. Our publications originate from a wide range of countries and scientific disciplines, describing and releasing valuable datasets from across the biological, physical, environmental and social sciences. For examples see two of our top articles from our first year:
Most-accessed: A comprehensive database of the geographic spread of past human Ebola outbreaks
Most cited: Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system
Scientific Data’s inclusion in PubMed and PMC will provide even more international visibility and recognition for our contributors, and confirms the importance and potential of high quality data descriptions. Now our authors’ data will be more easily found, more widely read and more extensively reused by a growing audience..
In addition, Scientific Data is now listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Our content is already indexed by Google Scholar, and we are currently in the process of applying for indexing by Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science.
Tomorrow
As more scientists choose our journal to share their data, our vision at Scientific Data is to create the perfect home for the world’s quality research data and to also make the data widely discoverable and reusable. We believe that data articles will progressively be recognized as first class scientific products, effectively linking traditional research articles and data repositories.