Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, has announced that its journal BMC Research Notes has partnered with BioSharing to bring out the first version of a catalogue of standards. Research community, funding agencies, and journals can now participate in the development of reporting standards for the bioscience domain to ensure that shared experiments are reported with enough information to be comprehensible and (in principle) reproducible, compared or integrated.
Since its launch in 2008, BMC Research Notes has been working with research communities in all fields of biology and medicine to ensure that data files are published in standard, reusable formats. To facilitate this, the journal has been aiming to produce recommendations for domain-specific data file standards, making it easier for researchers to find information about the optimum, interoperable formats for their data. The launch of a thematic series on Data standardization, sharing and publication edited by open access advocates Dr Bill Hooker and Dr David Shotton was an important step for the journal.
Through this project, BMC Research Notes seeks to build a growing network of experts on data standards from different communities - from genomics and proteomics, through to metabolomics and medical informatics. BioSharing's standards catalogue and BMC Research Notes' series complement one another - standards groups can contribute educational data notes to the series which helps raise awareness of a specific standard, and which then can be linked to the BioSharing catalogue.
BioSharing is a collaborative project founded by Susanna-Assunta Sansone and Dawn Field (Oxford e-Research Center at the University of Oxford). Through the development of 'one-stop-shop' catalogues of standards and policies, BioSharing offers a valuable resource for scientists to identify the standard most suitable for their data while offering a forum for stakeholders (research community, funding agencies, and journals) that promotes and encourages discussion to facilitate harmonisation and interoperability.
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