--- andrea : wei-ching : huang ---: Thinking About Years Past for Research: Relations for Research (R4R)

"The year 2013 will come to an end soon. However, new progresses in scientific sharing and publishing are just beginning. The global demands on public access to research data have been endorsed by many government policies. The movement toward Open Science has also been welcomed by several key scientific publishing actors.  To name just a few, Nature Publishing Group has just announced the launch of an online data journal, Scientific Data, for the open access to detailed data descriptions. The data journal, Earth System Science Data (ESSD), adopts a new form of the reviewing policy, which allows scientists and general public to review and comment articles. Later, these interactive comments plus author’s responses and revisions are published and archived openly in fully citable and paginated forms to the general public. Web services like figshare, f1000research, or Research Compendia provide scientists new tools and alternative platforms to curate their research outputs.  High-level requirements of science reproducibility result in the coming of a new science publishing paradigm. This paradigm requires the packaging of articles, data and code, and encourage their joint publications. The initial task has been taken by some bio-medical science practices. Recently, the Executable Papers of ScienceDirect in computer science has implemented this vision online.  Thus, the dilemma we face today is both the new possibilities and new problems which are carried by 'big data' and 'open data' research. While we embrace the coming of big data and open research in a data-driven context, we have to tackle the data deluge problems caused by data generation, data sharing, and data publishing. Problems like data heterogeneity, interoperability, accessibility, citability, reproducibility as well as legal issues remain major challenges to the research communities. Despite huge varieties existing in different domains, the difficulty falls into two main categories: technical issues and policy instruments. What we need is an intelligent openness strategy as outlined in for example Geoffrey Boulton’s proposal that we present the scientific argument (the data and concept) together, as well as an integrated infrastructure for this new research paradigm ..."