Promoting cultural change in data publishing

The citable publication of research data with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a key element in the current cultural change of scientific publishing: a research publication today is much more than a printed or electronically available manuscript. Data, software, experimental protocols, and physical samples associated with a scientific article meet the increasing demands for more integrity, transparency, and reproducibility of research. In addition, the reusability of data by others opens up extensive research options.

FID GEO [1], the Specialised Information Service for Solid Earth Geosciences (Fachinformationsdienst Geowissenschaften der Festen Erde) is a German key player for the promotion of data publications in the geosciences and offers data publication services with their partner repository GFZ Data Services, the domain repository for geosciences data, hosted at GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences. With regular workshops and conference presentations, FID GEO informs researchers and infrastructure units alike about both technical aspects on data publications and international developments in the data curation landscape.

This presentation focuses on recent recommendations for publishers, repositories and funders, developed within the “Enabling FAIR Data in the Earth and Space Sciences” Project (funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and led by AGU, [2]). Building on the work of The Coalition on Publishing Data in the Earth and Space Sciences (COPDESS, [3]), Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), and the Research Data Alliance (RDA), the Enabling FAIR Data in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences project has issued recommendations, standards, and tools to meet the challenges associated with state-of-the-art data publication and sample identification. Researchers play a vital role in changing the data publication culture towards a future in that data is no longer published as supplements to journals, but in data repositories, data citations are executed with DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), and data citations in reference lists of the articles will be the standard. Publishers will honour increasingly the citation of DOI-referenced data publications, actively promote the use of domain repositories and request a data availability statement. Funders will promote open and FAIR data principles and practices in their core Earth, space, and environmental science activities and policies and align data management plans accordingly.

[1] www.fidgeo.de

[2] https://copdess.org/enabling-fair-data-project/

[3] https://copdess.org