DataCite brochure

DataCite have released a brochure describing who and what they are, as well as what DOIs are how you get them etc...

https://datacite.org/assets/DataCite_Brochure.pdf

New data journal - Journal of Open Humanities Data

 New data journal - Journal of Open Humanities Data

"Humanities subjects of interest to JOHD include, but are not limited to Art History, History, Linguistics, Literature, Music, Philosophy, Religious Studies, etc. Data that crosses one or more of these traditional disciplines are highly encouraged."

​

Cute graphic!

DOIs for data and software

Exciting to see DOIs and citations for related software and data in this recently released paper by Alex Whan (CSIRO) et al in "Plant Methods".   Scroll down the reference list to entries 32 & 33 to see data citation in action.

http://www.plantmethods.com/content/10/1/23

Interesting that the publisher has chosen an alternative to the citation format recommended by DataCite, but the presence of a  DOI will help with tracking reuse and citation metrics.

Fantastic short video on DOIs and data citation

This one comes from The Netherlands and it's brilliant.  A succinct, clear explanation. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgqtiY7oZ6k

The new science journalism and open science (blog post)

The New York Times is quietly changing the practice of science journalism. The Tuesday April 21, 2015 article: Ebola Lying in Wait, reports on "A growing body of scientific clues - some ambiguous, other substantive" that the Ebola virus may have lain dormant in West African rain forest for years before igniting last year's outbreak. In the 6th paragraph of the on-line edition mention is made of "adetailed prediction of other likely Ebola dangers zones" made by a team of scientists. The words "detailed prediction" are innocuously provided with the hyper-link above. What I think is extraordinary is that this link points to the scientific paper: Mapping the zoonotic niche of Ebola virus disease in Africa by David M Piggot et al. published on the open science publishing platform eLife. This is the real science including the measured language of a scientific paper, the lengthly descriptions of the data sets, the innumerable references and even the reviewers comments and the authors' responses. I don't think that there is a better way to cultivate a scientific outlook than to make relevant, science open and accessible. 

Read the full blog post at http://www.r-bloggers.com/the-new-science-journalism-and-open-science/

Research Data Explored: Citations versus Altmetrics

The study explores the citedness of research data, its distribution over time and how it is related to the availability of a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) in Thomson Reuters' DCI (Data Citation Index). We investigate if cited research data "impact" the (social) web, reflected by altmetrics scores, and if there is any relationship between the number of citations and the sum of altmetrics scores from various social media-platforms. Three tools are used to collect and compare altmetrics scores, i.e. PlumX, ImpactStory, and Altmetric.com. In terms of coverage, PlumX is the most helpful altmetrics tool. While research data remain mostly uncited (about 85%), there has been a growing trend in citing data sets published since 2007. Surprisingly, the percentage of the number of cited research data with a DOI in DCI has decreased in the last years. Only nine repositories account for research data with DOIs and two or more citations. The number of cited research data with altmetrics scores is even lower (4 to 9%) but shows a higher coverage of research data from the last decade. However, no correlation between the number of citations and the total number of altmetrics scores is observable. Certain data types (i.e. survey, aggregate data, and sequence data) are more often cited and receive higher altmetrics scores.

Download the full article at http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.03342  (submitted on 14 Jan 2015)

DataCite and CrossRef

The DataCite Board has agreed to work together with CrossRef to:

- Enhance the interoperability of our respective systems in order to make it easier for publishers, data centres, libraries and third parties to integrate with the scholarly DOI ecosystem.
- Provide comprehensive support for interlinking between articles and data.
- Develop open APIs and open source tools to surface citations and other relationships between publications and data sets.
- Integrate into their services other existing scholarly communications initiatives such as ORCID and FundRef.
- Develop systems, workflows and best practices for using DOIs to reference large, highly granular and dynamic data.

More details on the DataCite website:  http://www.datacite.org/CrossRefDataCiteinitiative

CrossRef and DataCite announce new initiative to accelerate the adoption of DOIs for data publication and citati

Published by Sergio Ruiz on 10 November 2014 - 10:56am

In 2014 DataCite celebrates its fifth year of operation and CrossRef its fifteenth. Together we have registered almost 75 million DOIs. Today the two organisations are committing to accelerate the adoption of DOIs for data publication and citation.

Data are essential building blocks of scholarship and research in the sciences, medicine, technology, social sciences, and humanities. DataCite and CrossRef will work together to ensure that researchers can seamlessly navigate among all research results including articles and data and to make data a first class, identifiable, referenceable, and citable element in the scholarly record.

DataCite and CrossRef have agreed to collaborate to:

• Enhance the interoperability of their respective systems in order to make it easier for publishers, data centres, libraries and third parties to integrate with the scholarly DOI ecosystem.
• Provide comprehensive support for interlinking between articles and data.
• Develop open APIs and open source tools to surface citations and other relationships between publications and data sets.
• Integrate into their services other existing scholarly communications initiatives such as ORCID and FundRef.
• Develop systems, workflows and best practices for using DOIs to reference large, highly granular and dynamic data.

Linking data and publications

Do you want to see if a CrossRef DOI (typically assigned to publications) refers to DataCite DOIs (typically assigned to data)? Here you go:
http://api.labs.crossref.org/graph/doi/10.4319/lo.1997.42.1.0001
Conversely, do you want to see if a DataCite DOI refers to CrossRef DOIs? Voilà:
http://api.labs.crossref.org/graph/doi/10.1594/pangaea.185321

“How can we effectively integrate data into the scholarly record?” This is the question that has, for the past few years, generated an unprecedented amount of handwringing on the part researchers, librarians, funders and publishers. Indeed, this week I am in Amsterdam to attend the 4th RDA plenary in which this topic will no doubt again garner a lot of deserved attention.

We hope that the small example above will help push the RDAs agenda a little further. Like the recent ODIN project, It illustrates how we can simply combine two existing scholarly infrastructure systems to build important new functionality for integrating research objects into the scholarly literature.
Does it solve all of the problems associated with citing and referring to data? Can the various workgroups at RDA just cancel their data citation sessions and spend the week riding bikes and gorging on croquettes? Of course not. But my guess is that by simply integrating DataCite and CrossRef in this way, we can make a giant push in the right direction.

There are certainly going to be differences between traditional citation and data citation. Some even claim that citing data isn’t “as simple as citing traditional literature.” But this is a caricature of traditional citation. If you believe this, go off an peruse the MLA, Chicago, Harvard, NLM and APA citation guides. Then read Anthony Grafton’s, The Footnote? Are you back yet? Good, so let’s continue…

Citation of any sort is a complex issue- full of subtleties, edge-cases exceptions, disciplinary variations and kludges. Historically, the way to deal with these edge-cases has been social, not technical. For traditional literature we have simply evolved and documented citation practices which generally make contextually-appropriate use of the same technical infrastructure (footnotes, endnotes, metadata, etc.). I suspect the same will be true in citing data. The solutions will not be technical, they will mostly be social. Researchers, and publishers will evolve new, contextually appropriate mechanisms to use existing infrastructure deal with the peculiarities of data citation.

Does this mean that we will never have to develop new systems to handle data citation? Possibly But I don’t think we’ll know what those systems are or how they should work until we’ve actually had researchers attempting to use and adapt the tools we have.

Technical background

About five years ago, CrossRef and DataCite explored the possibility of exposing linkages between DataCite and CrossRef DOIs. Accordingly, we spent some time trying to assemble an example corpus that would illustrate the power of interlinking these identifiers. We encountered a slight problem. We could hardly find any examples. At that time, virtually nobody cited data with DataCite DOIs and, if they did, the CrossRef system did not handle them properly. We had to sit back and wait a while.
And now the situation has changed.
This demonstrator harvests DataCite DOIs using their OAI-PMH API and links them in a graph database with CrossRef DOIs. We have exposed this functionality on the “labs” (i.e. experimental) version of our REST API as a graph resource. So…
You can get a list of CrossRef DOIs that refer to DataCite DOIs as follows:
http://api.labs.crossref.org/graph?rel=cites:*&filter=source:crossref,related-source:datacite
And the converse:
http://api.labs.crossref.org/graph?rel=cites:*&filter=source:datacite,related-source:crossref

Caveats and Weasel Words

• We have not finished indexing all the links.
• The API is currently a very early labs project. It is about as reliable as a devolution promise from Westminster.
• The API is run on a pair of raspberry-pi’s connected to the internet via bluetooth.
• It is not fast.
• The representation and the API is under active development.

Read more on the CrossTech Blog...


Linking data and publications by Geoffrey Bilder, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOIs and citations for software and data

Exciting to see DOIs and citations for related software and data in this recently released paper in "Plant Methods".   Scroll down the reference list to entries 32 & 33 to see data citation in action.

http://www.plantmethods.com/content/10/1/23

Interesting that the journal has chosen not to conform to the DataCite preferred citation format, but the presence of a  DOI will help with tracking reuse and citation metrics.