Spaced Out ::

Paolo also pinged me a link to the Geoscience Data Journal, published by Wiley under open access. Data publication is close to my heart (and Journal of Maps) and something I have blogged about before here, here and here. With so much digital data we are in a generation that may end up losing lots of it. This is not something that has gone unnoticed by libraries, governments or research councils, as well as societies. As a result there are various subject-based or more broad brush clearing houses for maintained data and outputs from limited-life projects. At the tail end of “limited-life” you have funded and unfunded research. Wiley clearly think GDJ is worth a punt in that it is targeting the whole geoscience community with the USP that as an author you garner a peer-reviewed publication and that your data becomes citable and widely available. This is something we have supported at JoM and published about our citation strategies more recently. In short we enable citation of authors, secondary authors, map authors and data authors.

Data citation in other disciplines (e.g. physics)is more common due to the nature of reproducible research and the need to re-test initial findings. So this is nothing but a good move and with the journal open to submissions it will be interesting to see what the first few issues look like. Papers are intended to be short (1200-6000 words) and have the dataset deposited with an “approved” repository (”one that can mint a DOI, is commonly used by the scientific community it supports and has a formal data management policy”). It’s this latter point that is the killer…. there are only 2 UK based repositories. These things do need to grow organically, but given the Ed board has an international membership one would have hoped for slightly wider coverage to encourage submission. Anyway, you have to start somewhere (and JoM is a nice example of that) and they have the support of a publisher, repositories and a top-class Ed board. Watch that space….