www.plos.org
Dryad UK discussion meetingMark Patterson, Director of Publishing
April 27, 2010
Committed to making the world’s
scientific and medical literature
a public resource
www.plos.org
Why share data?
• Complete picture of the work• Reliability of the
conclusions/recommendations• Developing alternative interpretations• Reusing the data for new analyses
– Data may be unique/precious
• Human participants deserve it– Whilst preserving confidentiality
www.plos.org
Consequences of not sharing data
• Misunderstanding• Uncorrected errors• Misrepresentation • Duplication of effort• Limits research impact
..at least 70 structures demonstrated to be falsified…
…the current problems could not have been easily discovered without the availability of the
structure-factor files
…the full data must be accessible for scrutiny by the
scientific community.
www.plos.org
Barriers to (effective) data sharing
• Technical barriers– Lack of infrastructure (database)– Lack of standards (formats)– Too much data
• Administrative and legal barriers– Lack of clarity of reuse terms– Lots of files to organize and process– Publishers don’t make it easy enough
• Cultural barriers– Sharing is not the norm– Insufficient incentives– Maximizing credit via publication encourages hoarding of data
www.plos.org
The role of publishers
• Policy requiring data sharing as a condition of publication
• Quality control of data• Providing incentives to share data
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Challenges to policy development
• Discipline-specific differences– Data sharing tradition/behaviour– Availability of an established database– Enforcing the right standards at the right time– Privacy/confidentiality issues
• Technical issues– Quantity of data– CC Zero Waiver
• Policing the policy– Making sure restrictions are clear before publication– Appropriate action after publication
www.plos.org
Quality control - image manipulation
• Images screened for inappropriate manipulation
• Most frequent problem is that original files cannot be found
• Should all raw data be submitted?
www.plos.org
Incentives
• Provide a forum for ‘data papers’• Indicators for the impact of datasets
– Make sure that datasets are properly cited
www.plos.org
PLoS Currents: Influenza Workflow
Google Knol: Author(s) assemble content and control access and editing. Authors submit content to PLoS Currents.
PLoS Currents: Moderators control posting of content, commenting and version control.
PubMed Central: Immediate transfer from PLoS Currents site; stable identifier and permanent archiving.
• PLoS Currents Influenza• Very fast• Very cheap• Moderated by experts • Citable• Version control• Archived at PubMed Central• Indexed in PubMed
http://www.plosone.org/enhanced/pone.0006975/
http://www.plosone.org/enhanced/pone.0006975/
(http://tiny.cc/ALM1)
“Article-level metrics” could be applied to datasets in Dryad
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