Category Archives: Featured

Call for submissions: High-throughput 3D screening

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Call for Submissions

High-throughput 3D Screening

Organizer: Dr. Kaylene Simpson (Peter Mac)

Scientific Data is inviting submissions releasing and describing data from high-throughput screens employing cutting-edge 3D cell or tissue culture systems. Screens using a wide range of perturbations will be considered, including chemical libraries or functional genomic screens. Priority will be given to submissions that employ high-content imaging techniques, and which have particular value for methods development in this growing area.

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Call for submissions: Reproducible data processing

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Call for Submissions

Special Article Collection on
Reproducible data processing

In collaboration with Harvard Dataverse

Scientific Data is inviting submissions that provide compelling examples of how portable computing technologies can be used to create transparent, reproducible descriptions of data processing workflows. Submissions considered for this collection should describe valuable research datasets that involve some form of computational processing in their production. Authors should provide source code for all data processing steps in a way that would allow others, including referees, to easily understand and execute all processing steps. Continue reading →

Call for submissions: Multiomics data

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Call for Submissions

Special Article Collection on
Multiomics data

Organizers: Ana Conesa, Sonia Tarazona

Scientific Data is inviting submissions that release and describe datasets from studies that employed multiple ‘omic’ profiling technologies, including, but not limited to, genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics. Submitted articles may be considered for inclusion in a special article collection to be published at the journal. Continue reading →

New checklist for ‘complementary’ Data Descriptors

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Today, we are releasing a new checklist for authors drafting Data Descriptors that build or expand on other publications. It is now available on our Editorial & Publishing Policies page and from the link below.

Complementary Data Descriptor Checklist

Data Descriptors are designed to be complementary to traditional research articles. Researchers can describe and release their data in a more complete manner, and may be able to reduce their reliance on supplementary material, which can be hard to find and poorly accessible during peer-review, and which offers authors little additional credit. About half of the Data Descriptors published at Scientific Data so far are linked to one or more research articles at other journals. Continue reading →

Author’s Corner: Revisiting the personalities of wild chimpanzees

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NIK_7884-small

Alexander Weiss

Guest post by Alexander Weiss of the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Early on in her behavioural observations of the chimpanzees at what is now known as Gombe National Park, Jane Goodall was struck by their personalities, which were as distinct as our own1. However, upon sharing her observations with a ‘respected ethologist’, she was told that, yes, animals differed in their behaviour, but that this was best ‘swept under the carpet’ (pp 11-12)2. Continue reading →

New step-by-step submission guidelines

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Today, we released a thoroughly revised and improved version of our Submission Guidelines, making submitting to Scientific Data easier than ever before.

The process of drafting and submitting a manuscript to the journal is now organized into seven clear steps. In Step 1, we provide a simple summary of the journal’s four main content-types (Data Descriptor, Article, Analysis and Comment), so authors can be sure they have selected the most appropriate format before beginning to draft their manuscript. In the next steps, we provide detailed information on depositing data, and on drafting and submitting a manuscript to the journal. These steps focus centrally on the Data Descriptor – the journal’s main content-type and the one that differs most from formats at other journals – but we have also improved the information we provide for authors drafting other content-types. Continue reading →

An open approach to Huntington’s disease research

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Guest post by Rachel Harding, postdoctoral fellow at the Structural Genomics Consortium, University of Toronto, Canada

Rachel Harding

{credit}Rachel Harding{/credit}

Huntington’s disease (HD) is a fatal neurodegenerative disorder caused by a mutation in the huntingtin gene1. The progressive break down of brain neuronal cells in HD patients leads to deteriorating mental and physical abilities over a 10-20 year period prior to death, the symptoms often described as having Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) simultaneously2. At the start of the huntingtin gene there is a CAG trinucleotide repeat region that encodes a stretch of poly-glutamine residues in the amino-terminus of the encoded protein. This repeat tract is expanded in HD patients. The repeat length of this region correlates with the age of symptom onset3. Affecting approximately 1 in 10,000 of the population4, rare juvenile forms of the disease exist in patients with the longest CAG expansions, although adult-onset HD patients typically have between 40-50 CAG repeats with symptom onset beginning between the ages of 35-50. Continue reading →

Data Matters: Interview with Ben Lehner

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Ben Lehner

{credit}Ben Lehner{/credit}

Ben Lehner is a group leader at the EMBL/CRG Systems Biology Research Unit, in Barcelona, Spain.

Could you briefly introduce your own research?

My lab works on genetics, essentially. It’s a mixture of producing our own data, and using other people’s data. We’re a combined wet and dry lab, and we work with organisms and data from bacteria, through yeast, worms, all the way up to human clinical genetic data.

Broadly, how open do you think the human genomics community has been to sharing data?

I think there is a cultural history here that’s important. You can divide the human genomics community into two groups. Continue reading →

Data citations at Scientific Data

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Manuscripts published at Scientific Data contain a ‘Data Citations’ section that helps authors formally acknowledge any datasets mentioned in their manuscript. We know that this section is unfamiliar to many of our authors, so here we provide some background on the purpose of data citations, and advice on completing this section when submitting to Scientific Data. Continue reading →

Enabling the effective sharing of clinical data

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This blog was written by Mathias Astell & Iain Hrynaszkiewicz and was originally published on the DNAdigest blog.

The benefits of sharing data generated by researchers have long been understood to be of great value to science (as exemplified by this British Medical Journal piece from 1994). And over recent years there has been a rapid increase in the ability to share and access research data – as can be seen in the rise of data journals (such as Scientific Data and Gigascience), the increase in research data repositories (both general and subject-specific), and the establishment of data sharing policies around the world. Continue reading →