Guest Post by Dr. Allyson Lister, Knowledge Engineer, BioSharing & ISA-Tools, University of Oxford e-Research Centre BioSharing‘s Information Resources are curated and searchable web-based registries of linked information about content standards (broadly including minimum information reporting requirements, terminologies and representation formats/models), databases, and (progressively) journal and funder policies in the life sciences. Read more
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. Read more
Michael Milham discusses the origins of the brain-imaging data-sharing initiatives he has helped found, and what he has learned in terms of motivating scientists to share. Read more
An Editorial published this week at Nature Genetics endorsed the goals of the DivSeek initiative and issued a call for wider sharing of plant phenotype data – particularly phenotypic data associated with important genetic and genomic studies. Scientific Data supports this call, and we invite researchers to submit manuscripts to our journal describing and releasing such datasets. Read more
Scientific Data and Nature Publishing Group’s open data initiatives have been presented to Japanese audiences through several recent events. Read more
At Scientific Data we have been considering how we might develop our scope and editorial policies to better accommodate clinical research data. Publication of clinical research presents a number of challenges, which we will not be the first to have attempted to solve. In particular, we might need to support linking of our primary article type, the data descriptor, to non-public datasets – datasets that cannot be open access due to patient privacy or other legitimate constraints. While we advocate setting the default for research data to open, we are also conscious that full anonymisation of clinical data is often impossible to achieve with certainty. Read more
This week, Nature and the Nature research journals made some important updates to their data availability policies: updates that strengthen the editorial links between Nature journals and Scientific Data; updates that provide better resources and support for authors wishing to better support reproducible research; and updates that leverage the work of Scientific Data to curate datasets and identify suitable data repositories for more authors. See the related editorial published at Nature. Read more
Today, we are pleased to announce our first Advisory Panel and Editorial Board members from the social sciences. Researchers from these communities are now invited to submit Data Descriptor manuscripts describing quantitative datasets, particularly those that may be of use for integrative analyses that stretch across the traditional boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Read more
Tony Hey’s job at Microsoft is to connect external scientific researchers with researchers at Microsoft to solve big data scientific problems that people care about. He observes that some scientific areas are more open to this than others, depending on the commercial value attached to the data. He believes that funding agencies and libraries need to assist researchers by providing tools and infrastructure that support open science.
