Recommendations for Services to Journals. CESSDA Work Plan 2020.

Journals Outreach is a sub-task of the CESSDA Work Plan 2020 Task Widening Activities and Journals Outreach. The report presents the results from a focus group of selected Service Providers (SPs) that consisted of six participants from the consortium of 22 CESSDA Members (excluding CESSDA Partners). The discussion of the group focused on the key strategic elements in going forward with SPs developing and promoting services for supporting scientific journals and the participants contributed a range of opinions and ideas, with general agreement around solid recommendations. For example, the participants proposed a long-term strategy by CESSDA, collecting information on maximum capacities by SPs for providing services to journals and estimates of potential demand for services related to journal data archiving. This should be combined with strengthened collaboration between SPs, so that demand for journal-related services can be redistributed, where possible and appropriate, depending on SP capacities and expertise. Another important recommendation was to improve the visibility of journals in the CESSDA Data Catalogue by indicating datasets linked to specific journal articles and allowing searches of data collections related to journal articles. Overall, CESSDA has an important role to play in coordinating activities related to supporting journals and promoting SP services to journal editors and publishers.