STM publisher Elsevier has announced that its data sharing infrastructure has been implemented across 13 journals covering all areas of Materials Science.
Offering multiple data sharing options for an entire subject discipline not only meets the needs of researchers in the field, but also addresses one of the key objectives in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy outlined in its Strategic Plan for the Materials Genome Initiative: unlock durable access to research data.
The 13 journals, together covering all fields of materials science, ranging from aircraft materials to hip implants, will offer different options to make the data that underpins the journals' studies accessible and facilitate sharing and contextualization of the data. The journals are: Acta Biomaterialia; Acta Materialia; CALPHAD; Composites Part A; Computational Materials Science; Construction and Building Materials; Materials Discovery; Materials Science & Engineering A; Materials Science & Engineering B; Materials Science & Engineering C; Polymer; Scripta Materialia; and Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells.
Across these journals, the open data sharing options available for researchers are: Interactive Plots, Open Data and Data in Brief.
Under the Interactive Plots option, authors are invited to submit a file containing the data points from their graphs, which enables readers to benefit from interactive graph functionality and provides them with access to the data.
Open Data allows authors to upload raw research data alongside their article, validated by editors and reviewers, the datasets can be freely downloaded and re-used under a CC-BY license.
Under the Data in Brief option authors can upload a microarticle providing the context and metadata relative to data underpinning the study reported in an article accepted in the linked journal. The microarticle will then be automatically submitted for publication in the open access journal Data in Brief.
Separately these data sharing options are also available across other Elsevier journals, however these Materials Science journals and their editorial teams now support and offer the full range.
The data sharing options for researchers has also received strong support from the editors of the selected journals.
