The rise of the ‘Data Journal’

"Recently, we noted that 2015 seems to be the year that funders get serious about academic data. With the emergence of open data mandates, we are now talking about ‘when’, not ‘if’, the majority of academic outputs will live openly on the web. Funders, governments, and institutions are already making preparations for how this content should be best managed and preserved. But if we think about it, the three stakeholders mentioned above have not controlled the dissemination of content for the last 350 years. This has been the remit of academic publishers.   The last wave of funder mandates around open access have meant that there are some fundamental changes in the business models around academic publishing. This begs the question as to whether publishers can serve as the disseminators of academic data too. You may not be aware but publishers have been steadily releasing data journals with increasing frequency over the last 5 years. The most recent of which being Elsevier’s Data in Brief.  Perhaps the most well received in this space has been Nature’s Scientific Data journal. This journal focuses on ‘Data Descriptors’, as opposed to results-based research articles. This serves as a way to preserve the datasets in a well curated manner, something that we at figshare have been exploring for some time now ..."