Open access journal BMC Research Notes has announced that it has commissioned a large, ongoing collection of educational articles which outline procedures for sharing data that enable the data to be readily re-used by others. The initiative is seen to provide researchers with best practice guidance for exposing their 'dark data' to the light.
The first article in this series, by Vickers and Cronin, provides a template for the provision and description of experimental data, from a cancer cohort study, for public distribution. As it grows, the collection is expected to prove hugely significant for encouraging future scientific advances, and lead to an increased level of secondary data sharing within the scientific community.
The sharing, preservation and reuse of data has become an increasingly important element of modern scientific research, according to the journal. However, whilst large granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health have recently embraced data sharing, resistance amongst some parts of the scientific community has continued to slow down the pace of scientific progress. All this time, valuable research data over the world is still kept under lock and key or hidden away in lab drawers, the journal points out.
BMC Research Notes is seeking to encourage as wide a range of submissions as possible by waiving the publication fee for all articles which use or link to open data that is prepared in line with a community-accepted standard. This approach is part of publisher BioMed Central's wider support for the open data movement, which includes the presentation of the 'BioMed Central Open Data Award' at the publisher's annual Research Awards Ceremony.
It is expected that increasing online open data availability in formats than can be readily re-used and analysed by others would put the processing power into journalists' hands, rather than relying on outside specialists such as policy makers to provide insights. The aim is to make raw data analysed and interpreted in newsrooms.
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