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.

The principles are goals that publishers, researchers and data repositories can work towards as we establish the best ways to cite data.  By doing so we will increase the transparency of the scientific process alongside providing appropriate credit mechanisms and recognizing diverse scholarly contributions, areas where NPG is already active.

Scientific Data has taken the first step in implementing these principles with a data citations section in our articles, which you can see on our first two publications.

Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system
Zengchao Hao, Amir AghaKouchak, Navid Nakhjiri and Alireza Farahmand

The systematic identification of cytoskeletal genes required for Drosophila melanogaster muscle maintenance
Alexander D. Perkins, Michael J.J. Lee and Guy Tanentzapf

NPG plans to roll out data citations across the Nature branded titles in the near future and we look forward to working with the Force11 community and others to refine and improve implementation as guided by the Joint Declaration.