Endorsing the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles

We are very pleased to share that NPG has endorsed the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles.  These principles are a synthesis of previous guidelines and have been released by the Data Citation Synthesis Group a collaboration involving CODATA, the Research Data Alliance, members of the Force11 community, publishers and others.

The guiding principles stress the importance of data resources in scientific communication and the need for citation to facilitate credit and attribution to those who contribute to data generation – summed up in the Joint Declaration of Data Citations preamble below.

Sound, reproducible scholarship rests upon a foundation of robust, accessible data.  For this to be so in practice as well as theory, data must be accorded due importance in the practice of scholarship and in the enduring scholarly record.  In other words, data should be considered legitimate, citable products of research.  Data citation, like the citation of other evidence and sources, is good research practice and is part of the scholarly ecosystem supporting data reuse. Continue reading

Scientific Data’s first publications

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Both of these works present valuable, previously unpublished datasets.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.

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