The now and the future of data publishing | Exchanges

"Open Science is of course a key theme. To quote Professor Geoffrey Boulton[1], speaking at the Knowledge Exchange event in Berlin earlier this year: 'Publishing articles without making the data available is scientific malpractice'.  This was something absolutely at the heart of the recent one day conference titled The Now and Future of Data Publishing (#nfdp13), held alongside the ORCID-DRYAD associated meetings.  The underlying goal was: how can we make this data available and thus avoid scientific malpractice?  The keynote speaker. Professor Peter Fox, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, began by exploring the critical importance of building context around raw data in order to be able to meaningfully create knowledge. He highlighted the importance of a ‘data review’ stage prior to publication. He also foresaw the role – or function, or skill-set – of the ‘data reviewer’ to be increasingly prominent in the near future.   Who that ‘data reviewer’ is (the researcher, the PI, the librarian, the funder, the publisher?) remains up for debate.  Unni Karunakara, President of Médicins Sans Frontières, showed that integrating non-medical data (e.g. demographical, geographical, political, historical) into healthcare delivery models for neglected populations affected by conflict, disasters and epidemics can have a radical effect on treatment outcomes.  Around 150 participants from a variety of backgrounds attended the event, but there does remain the question, were all the right people in the room? Publishers, data centre managers, and many of the ‘usual suspects’ were there in force. However, I would have liked to see more librarians, representatives from learned societies, and researchers. These groups – particularly the latter – clearly need some convincing that time spent skilling up, curating and publishing data is time well spent. The balance between the drivers and barriers towards sharing one’s hard-won datasets still seems to be barrier-heavy.  Some other delegates have blogged about the various sessions, e.g. Sarah Callaghan of STFC andClaire Bower of the BMJ. I very much recommend their detailed responses to this event by way of context.  Also, a number of publishers showcased new data-enriched products, including Nature, OECD, F1000Research, EMBO, Elsevier and Ubiquity Press so I would recommend viewing their sites.  In addition, the Geosciences Data Journal from Wiley is an example of a newly devised open access platform where scientific data can be formally published, in a way that includes scientific peer-review.  As an organiser, I felt it was a successful event, and one which we’d be interested in building on (anyone for #nfdp14?).  However, although it sounds slightly heartless, I’d like to see some different faces in a year’s time. I also – profoundly – don’t want to be having the same conversations either. If we see new speakers and delegates, and have made discernible progress along that paradigm shift, then that would be a very good result indeed."