The Scientific Data team is traveling heavily over the next two months as we run-up to our formal launch in late May 2014. If you are attending one of these meetings, we would be delighted to meet you and learn about your data. And, don’t miss the special events we will be hosting at AACR and EGU this year!
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Earlier this month, Scientific Data published its first two Data Descriptors. These pre-launch articles recently cleared peer-review and we have decided to publish them before our formal launch in May 2014. They were published using a simplified article template, but they will be transferred to our more feature-rich publication platform in May, and will retain the same citation information and DOIs.
Both of these works present valuable, previously unpublished datasets. We are also actively considering Data Descriptor manuscripts that expand on previous publications (e.g. releasing important datasets in more detail, or making them more reusable), and we expect to have some excellent examples of these types of follow-up works for our launch in May.
Today, we released Scientific Data’s ISA-Tab metadata specification, a document describing in detail the format we use to capture and distribute machine-readable metadata content with our Data Descriptor articles.
Most authors will not need to understand our metadata specification in detail. Metadata records will be created with the help of our in-house curation support, after manuscripts have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, and authors will not need to have any special knowledge regarding metadata creation.
Advanced users, however, will be able to submit machine-readable directly with their Data Descriptor manuscripts with the help of this metadata specification. This specification document will also be invaluable to scientists that wish to mine the metadata associated with our publications.
We recently improved our webpages about our Editors, Editorial Board and Advisory Panel, to help you better explore the scientists, funders, librarians, and curators working with and supporting Scientific Data. These pages are now accessible through a new Advisory and Editorial Board landing page, which provides a brief summary of the different roles these groups play at Scientific Data.
Importantly, our Editorial Board Members now have their own page. Board Members are listed alphabetically and divided into two broad categories, “Biological Sciences” and “Earth, Environment and Ecological Sciences”, with their areas of expertise listed below their name and affiliation. We hope this new layout will help you browse the list and find Editorial Board Members within your area of research.
Please take a look: Scientific Data’s Editorial Board
Each published Data Descriptor will be accompanied by machine-readable metadata designed to help advanced users mine and search our content. These metadata will include basic information about the Data Descriptor article, as well as terms that describe key aspects of the experiments or procedures in the study. See Box 1 for a brief outline of this information.
After discussions with the community, and our Advisory Panel, we have decided to share this information under the Creative Commons Zero waiver (CC0), which is designed to free information of copyright restrictions. By applying the CC0 waiver to Data Descriptor metadata, we allow others to reuse it without legal limitation. Indeed, much of the content in these metadata files could be considered collections of “facts”, and may not be copyrightable in the first place – but, there can be substantial legal grey areas. The CC0 licence helps to remove ambiguity. Simply put, we don’t want data miners to have to hire a lawyer before using our metadata.
The main human-readable content of Data Descriptors — the body text of the main article, figures, etc — will remain covered by one of three open-access Creative Commons licences selected by the authors, all of which explicitly require attribution for any reuse (CC BY, CC BY-NC, & CC BY-NC-SA). The actual primary data files associated with Data Descriptors will be stored in one or more external repositories, which will have their own terms of use or licencing policies. Continue reading
If so, Scientific Data can help. It’s a new type of open access journal publishing a new type of content, the Data Descriptor, designed to provide detailed descriptions of datasets: focusing on how these have been produced, by whom, and how they could be reused. We aim to make your data more discoverable, interpretable and reusable. We are calling for submissions now and launching in May next year.
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We recently released two sample Data Descriptors to help prospective authors interested in submitting manuscripts to Scientific Data. These samples were created to help scientists understand our unique scope and formatting requirements, and to illustrate the value of detailed descriptions of valuable datasets. Over the coming weeks we will be releasing more detailed information for authors, including Data Descriptor templates, to help prepare scientists for our call for submissions at the end of September.
Sample 1: Proteomic profiles of human embryonic stem cells, induced-pluripotent stem cells and precursor fibroblasts, prepared by Javier Munoz and Albert J.R. Heck
Sample 2: Sequencing of genomes, transcriptomes and methylomes of wild Arabidopsis thaliana accessions, prepared Robert J. Schmitz, Matthew D. Schultz & Joseph R. Ecker
See this page to view the full sample articles and to download experimental metadata
Today we released Scientific Data’s detailed data deposition policies. If you are interested in submitting a Data Descriptor manuscript to Scientific Data, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with these policies. 
These are meant to be progressive policies that will support useful data sharing and reuse, while also strongly promoting existing community data repositories. You can read more about our goals in this regard in our related blog post.
Authors should be aware that these data deposition policies are more stringent than at most other research journals. In particular, authors will be required to deposit their data in an approved data repository before Scientific Data will consider sending a Data Descriptor out for peer-review. Data may be kept private until publication, but authors must provide editors and referees with access to the data in a confidential and secure manner. Submission, curation, and assignment of an accession number can take a matter of weeks at some data repositories, so we encourage authors to think about data submission early in the process of drafting a Data Descriptor.
Today, we added detailed “Guide to referees” and “Editorial and publishing policies” pages to Scientific Data’s website.
The “Guide to referees” builds on our earlier blog post introducing our referee questionnaire, and includes more detailed information on our criteria for publication and peer-review process.
Our “Editorial and publishing policies” introduce some important features that set Scientific Data apart as a new kind of data-focused publication:
Today we are pleased to announce the names of the first scientists to join Scientific Data’s Editorial Board. We are delighted to be working with these distinguished scientists. This list will continue to grow as we lead up to our Call for Submissions later this year.
