6.6. Data publication

Proper recognition of researchers' contributions is fundamental to ensuring widespread adoption of FAIR principles. Once the data have been created, processed, analysed, and their preservation ensured, a clear pathway to crediting the authors in all data-related publications needs to be established. As a minimum standard, datasets need to be cited like other references so as to credit the researchers involved.

Most datasets are published in repositories, often to support and underpin article publication. Linking academic articles and associated data is important for the findability of data and reproducibility of research. The last ten years have also seen the emergence of dedicated data papers and data journals where peer-reviewed datasets are taking centre stage.

Alongside traditional publications and datasets, there are numerous items of research support information that should be published to make research reproducible and data reusable. These include documentation of methods and protocols, or software and code.

All these research outputs are essential, and researchers can get credit for these parts of their research by publishing them, in turn making the work more shareable, discoverable, comprehensible, reusable, and reproducible.

Authors need to provide contextual information on the relevant dataset, method, software code or other element to be published, and institutions can support their researchers in navigating the emerging publication landscape.

Data availability statements

Data availability statements or statements of availability of supporting data provide information about where the data supporting the results described in a research article can be found and how they can be accessed. These statements can link to a data repository location where the data have been publicly deposited, or can refer to the supplementary information published as part of the article; data availability statements can also clarify when the data are not available or only available privately upon request to the authors. Since these statements are often in free-text form, it is often difficult to identify the level of data access and availability expressed in them. However, a study on 531,889 research articles from PLOS (13) and BMC (14) (Colavizza et al. 2020) has shown that only 12% to 21% of all analysed articles published in 2017 and 2018 included a data availability statement containing a link to a repository, but there is an association between those articles and up to 25% higher citation counts. This has contributed to encouraging the adoption of such statements in the research community as it shows a clear benefit for researchers in terms of the academic impact of their work.

Data papers, data journals and peer review for datasets

Alongside publication of the data in a repository and referencing it in research papers, dedicated data papers can also contribute to the increased visibility of the data and recognition of the researchers' work.

Data papers provide an easy channel for researchers to publish their datasets and receive proper credit and recognition for the work they have done. This is particularly true for replication data, negative datasets or data from intermediate experiments, which often go unpublished. Data papers enable researchers to easily share a brief, thorough description of their data, and contain or link to relevant raw data in a repository, in turn helping others discover, understand and reuse the data and reproduce results (Walters 2020).

Data journals have been around for a decade and were established to ensure that researchers creating datasets were appropriately credited with citable outputs. Examples of such journals include Scientific Data, GigaScience, F1000Research for scientific disciplines, and the Journal of Open Humanities Data and Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences for humanities and social sciences.

Recognised pathways to data publication raise the important topic of peer review of data, which needs to become a fundamental part of the publication process. From a researcher's perspective, the considerable time and resource commitment involved in data management and publication need to be supported by appropriate incentives.

Methods and protocols

Method and protocol articles provide details of the methods and/or protocols developed and the materials used during a research cycle. They recognise the time researchers spend customising methods and creating original laboratory resources. Not every method is novel enough to warrant a full research article. However, the customisations that researchers make to methods and the new materials they use can be useful for others, saving them valuable time in developing their own approaches. A platform for developing and sharing reproducible methods is provided by Protocols.io.

Software

Making software and code generated in the course of research available via platforms like GitHub is part of an Open Research workflow. Software research articles go a step further and may describe significant software and/or code, including relevant post-publication version updates, and/or capture metadata needed to help others apply the software in their own research. They also may describe the impact the software has had on scientific research. Software may also be published as a standalone output, using, e.g. the integration between GitHub and Figshare/Zenodo. The Software Sustainability Institute offers advice on this.

Other forms of articles relating to specific elements of the research process

Other forms of articles covering a specific aspect of research or the research process focus on hardware and lab resources as well as microarticles and visual case discussions (see Elsevier Research Elements).

Learn more:

(13) Public Library of Science (PLOS)

(14) BioMed Central (BMC)

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