Workshop looks at publishing open data in the plant sciences - Cambridge Network

"COPO is a BBSRC funded project, launched in September 2014 with the objective of improving open access to and management of data within plant research. Effective data usage is currently hindered by a lack of effective descriptions for those data, and an inconsistency across a vast number of tools and services regarding how data is accessed, formatted and cited. By addressing these disparities and enhancing interoperability between public repositories and analytical services, COPO will improve transparency and reproducibility in the plant sciences, helping to facilitate high-quality research. The two-day workshop was designed to gain greater insight into the types of experiments that biologists are undertaking across a broad set of plant science domains, how datasets are being generated, and the needs of the researchers that use them. This crucial information will be used to guide the creation of a COPO community platform for data sharing, publication and citation. Over the course of the workshop, the focus group discussed various issues including divergent approaches to the description, collection, annotation, standardisation and management of large datasets. The group examined features of various platforms used within plant science data management and spoke with researchers from different plant science fields to gain an overview of their current requirements and how to avoid and surmount the stumbling blocks when publishing their data ..."