STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced its collaboration with the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF), by incorporating the Minimal Data Standards across four of its neuroscience journals.
Minimal Data Standards are a set of recommendations developed by NIF, the most comprehensive portal of available web-based resources in the field of neuroscience, to facilitate resource identification in published neuroscience articles. One of the big challenges that neuroscientists face today is that research findings reported in the literature often lack sufficient details to enable reproducibility of methodology or reuse of data. With the launch of the Minimal Data Standards, NIF aims to address this issue.
Elsevier is one of the first scholarly publishers to adopt the Minimal Data Standards guidelines. Initially four Elsevier journals will take part in the pilot: Brain Research, Experimental Neurology, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, and Neurobiology of Disease. These journals will incorporate the guidelines into their article submission process, recommending authors to include gene/genome accession numbers, species specific nomenclatures, antibody identifiers, and software details in the methods section of their articles. More Elsevier neuroscience journals will join the initiative as the pilot further develops in 2014.
Supporting the NIF to roll out the Minimal Data Standards pilot with the aim of developing better and more accurate resource identification within the neuroscience literature, falls within the scope of Article of the Future, Elsevier's on-going program to improve the format of the scientific article.
