Scientific Data is exploring how peer-review mechanisms for sensitive human data can be improved. Here, we outline some of the initial feedback we received from leaders of human data repositories (HDRs), and some innovative alternatives to peer-review. Read more
Science is living in the era of data – the reuse of other people’s data can drive new research questions and products, and inspire new scientific discoveries … Read more
A growing awareness of the lack of reproducibility has undermined society’s trust and esteem in social sciences. In some cases, well-known results have been fabricated or the underlying data have turned out to have weak technical foundations. Read more
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. Read more
Citizen science, the collection or analysis of research data by the general public, has existed in one form or another for centuries, with contributions ranging from plant and animal observations to weather phenonmena1. In the field of land cover and land use, however, its application is relatively new2. Previously this was a task left largely to governments, research institutes and global bodies. With the recent availability of high resolution satellite imagery, this has changed, opening up new possibilities for citizen participation3. In our recent article in Nature Research’s Scientific Data4, we have made available a global dataset of crowdsourced land cover and land use reference data, containing the results of our first four citizen-science campaigns. Read more
This week the Springer Nature research data team are exploring how our research data policy initiative can help facilitate wider adoption of clear, consistent policies for publishing research data. Read more
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. Read more
Guest post by Xi-Nian Zuo, Project Coordinator and Co-Founder of Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility (CoRR), Professor of Psychology and Director of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center in the Institute of Psychology at Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. Read more
Guest post from Ruedi Aebersold, Professor of Systems Biology with a joint appointment at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, & George Rosenberger, PhD student in the Aebersold group at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology, ETH Zurich, on the various avenues for sharing proteomics data and the benefits of building community resources through open data
Guest post from Mark Viant, on the changes in standards and reporting for metabolomics data. Mark is Professor of Metabolomics in the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham, UK, and Director of both the national NERC Biomolecular Analysis Facility – Metabolomics and the Phenome Centre Birmingham. His research interests encompass the development of optimised analytical and computational workflows for high-throughput mass spectrometry based metabolomics and the application of these technologies to investigate the metabolic pathways underlying toxicity and adverse outcome pathways.