The disruptive potential of data publication | Notes and Records

"I argue here that the history of data science, contemporary developments in data dissemination, and particularly current debates around making data freely and widely accessible and re-usable (‘Open Data’) and being able to integrate and analyse large datasets from a variety of sources (‘Big Data’) evidence an increasing dissatisfaction with the ‘orderly writing’ promoted by long-running journals such as Philosophical Transactions, and a growing fascination with documenting the evidence base of claims made in scientific papers in a way that facilitates questioning and re-interpretation.2 This is a major factor underlying the blossoming of publication models that differ considerably from the traditional journal, including entities such as data journals, repositories for research software, code and models, and discussion forums devoted to methodological discussions on reproducibility and research protocols."