Data journals – an open data story

Here at the Data Library we have been thinking about how we can encourage our researchers who deposit their research data in DataShare to also submit these for peer review.

Why? We hope the impact of the research can be enhanced with the recognised added-value of peer review. Regardless whether there is a full-blown article to accompany the data.

We therefore decided recently to provide our depositors with a list of websites or organisations where they could do this.

I pulled a table together, from colleagues’ suggestions, from the PREPARDE project and the latest RDM textbook. And, very much in the Open Data spirit, I then threw the question open on Twitter:

“[..]does anyone have an up-to-date list of journals providin peer review of datasets (without articles), other than PREPARDE? #opendata�

…and published the draft list for others to check or make comments on. This turned out to be a good move. The response from the Research Data Management community on Twitter was very heartening, and colleagues from across the globe provided some excellent enhancements for the list.

That process has given us confidence to remove the word ‘Draft’ from the title – the list, this crowd-sourced resource, will need to be updated from time-to-time, but we are confident that we’ve achieved reasonable coverage of the things we were looking for.

Another result of this search was the realisation that what we had gathered was in fact quite clearly a list of Data Journals. My colleague Robin Rice has now added a definition of that term to the list, and we will be providing all our depositors with a link to it:

https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/datashare/Sources+of+dataset+peer+review

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