Guest post by Dr Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, Research Lecturer, Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford
Since it’s inception, Scientific Data has been working to encourage a “show me the data” culture, with the aim of publishing Data Descriptors on fully reusable datasets. Datasets can only be used if data have been rigorously described; as recently shown, even when journal policies on data archiving are strong, data are not always shared in a reusable manner¹.
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.
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
Scientific Data’s call for submissions is fast approaching, and accepted manuscripts will be featured at our platform’s launch in Spring 2014. We hope you’ll want to take part!
If you’re interested in publishing your datasets—and getting credit for them—all the information you need to draft and submit a manuscript is now available on our website (See Box 1, “Getting ready to submit”).