Open Access publisher BioMed Central, UK, has announced that since it introduced additional data sharing resources for authors and editors last year, there have been a number of further developments in the field that have necessitated an update to its supporting data information.
Eight more journals, including Retrovirology, Cell & Bioscience and Frontiers in Zoology, have introduced the 'Availability of supporting data' section. The aim is to either encourage or require all authors to consistently link their supporting data to their publication, or clearly indicate supporting data are included within the article and its additional files.
As well as increasing links between articles and data, another aim of the 'Availability of supporting data' section is help address this issue – to increase academic credit for data sharing by encouraging data citation. This month the publisher has made data citation even more strongly encouraged with an update to BioMed Central's reference style guide, found in any journal's instructions for authors. It now explicitly mentions datasets and provides an example of a dataset citation.
Data citation is recommended according to the standards proposed by DataCite, where persistent identifiers are displayed as linkable, permanent URLs. The 'Availability of supporting data' resources page has been updated with more information on citing and linking to data, in particular a link to a comprehensive guide from the Digital Curation Centre.
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