Open Access life-sciences journal F1000Research launched a new data plotting tool at the ongoing Neuroscience meeting in San Diego. The tool enables referees and readers to visualise and manipulate the raw data within the journal's articles. This is a significant step forward in enabling data peer review, which has typically been too time consuming for most article referees to contemplate.
A condition of publishing in the Open Access life sciences journal F1000Research is that authors make the data underlying their findings publicly available alongside the article. Openly sharing data is an important step in helping tackle issues around the lack of reproducibility of much published research, as well as enabling data reuse.
The new data plotting tool from F1000Research enables the data in the journal's articles to be assessed and reviewed, by letting users replot, analyse and interpret the supporting data through an instant first- pass view.
The tool can plot all numerical values in a CSV file as a scatter plot, with the options of defining the x-axis, as well as selecting whole columns or specifying particular values within individual columns. For the first time, this simple visualisation of the data set allows users to determine whether there are any obvious outliers, any correlations in the data that were possibly missed by the authors, and whether the authors' summary results (and hence their conclusions) make sense from their raw data.
The tool was initially launched in beta, and is available on two datasets from two different articles: http://f1000research.com/articles/2-150/v1#plot and http://f1000research.com/articles/1-70/v1#plot. It will soon be rolled out across all numerical spreadsheet data published in F1000Research. In addition, the tool is currently being showcased at the Neuroscience 2013 meeting in San Diego on booth 222.
