Building on ten years of experience in biodiversity data extraction, publishing and dissemination, scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft has introduced mandatory data audit for data papers submitted to any relevant journal across its exclusively open access portfolio.
The solution leverages both manual and technological expertise to ensure that datasets described in well-structured, fully citable and research-friendly data papers fully comply with the principles of FAIR data in research. The workflow is applicable to data either provided as supplementary material within the manuscript or linked from an external repository such as GBIF - the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.
Pensoft's data quality solution will be presented at the upcoming Biodiversity_Next conference on October 23 at 11:00 am.
Prior to being assigned to a subject editor, a data paper submitted to any relevant Pensoft journal undergoes mandatory data audit meant to ensure the findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of the associated data. Only after the process is completed, can a manuscript proceed to peer review. If there are major issues with the dataset, the data paper can be rejected right away, but resubmitted after the necessary corrections are applied. In case the authors have their datasets linked from an external repository, rather than provided as supplementary material within the data paper, they are also strongly encouraged to update their data in the associated dataset either prior or before the article's publication.
Within the data auditing workflow, a manuscript is first processed by an automated tool, designed to highlight probable issues, including encoding or data structure problems, which could make the dataset virtually inaccessible. Then, the paper is handled by an expert data auditor, whose task would be to carefully examine the data's quality from a scientific perspective. Following the check, the authors receive a report providing improvement recommendations, similarly to the commentaries they would receive following peer review. Suffice to say, by optimising these stages of the data auditing process, all parties involved save considerable amount of effort, thereby resulting in even shorter submission-to-publication time, as well as seamless user experience.
In a sense, the data auditing workflow is the natural continuation of years of endeavours at Pensoft to secure data quality in the biodiversity literature and its related online resources.
To explain how and why biodiversity data should be published in full compliance with the best (open) science practices, the team behind Pensoft and long-year collaborators published a guidelines paper, titled "Strategies and guidelines for scholarly publishing of biodiversity data" in the open science journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal).
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