New services to support open research - BioMed Central blog

"To enable Springer Nature authors and journals to follow good practice in sharing and archiving of research data, we’re developing a range of Data Support Services and from today are piloting an optional data deposition and curation service.

This service builds on our Research Data Support helpdesk, launched in July 2016, and will further help authors comply with funder policies, prepare their data for deposition in a repository and enhance their peer-reviewed publications. The service provides secure and private submission of data files, data curation and publisher-managed release of datasets. Authors will make their data openly available, under either a Creative Commons attribution license (CC BY) or the CC0 public domain waiver. The service is run by professional Research Data Editors and provided by Springer Nature in partnership with figshare.

The Data Support Service is being initially piloted as an offering to authors submitting manuscripts to six BMC journals: BMC Biology, BMC Research Notes, BMC Neuroscience, BMC Plant Biology, BMC Evolutionary Biology and BMC Genomics. The service will be offered free of charge during the first phase of the pilot so that we can refine it based on authors’ feedback to ensure it is valuable to them.

Use of this service is optional and authors are free to deposit data themselves in any relevant repository independently of this service. The service begins with an enquiry tool to help researchers decide whether they would benefit from the service. If the service is not relevant to them, advice is provided about alternatives, for example if a community specific or gated repository is more appropriate."