Integration of Data and Publications - Alliance for Permanent Access

Report on Integration of Data and Publications Grant Agreement no.: 261530
5. REPORT EPILOGUE: MAPPING PING THE ROAD AHEAD
5.1. Can Libraries and Data centres fill the missing link?
This report has shown that the key to ensuring the long term success of integrating data
and publications is to ensure that the data are managed and preserved in such as way
that they remain:
• Available
• Findable
• Interpretable
• Reusable
• Citable
These criteria are meaningful to, and act as incentives for, both researchers and
publishers to engage in linking data to publications but neither group believe they can
fulfil this role on their own. No one group has responsibility across the whole
communication chain or has the resources to satisfy all of these criteria. So a key
question we wish to raise here is; can librarians and data centres help fill this missing
link ? To what extent do they have the existing relationships with researchers and/ or
the related knowledge (including skills) to ensure that many of these criteria are met?
We have established that our three stakeholder groups of researchers, publishers and
libraries and data centres have much to gain from embracing the integration of data and
publications. There are several opportunities to be grasped for researchers, publishers,
and libraries and data centres. It is clear from the researcher’s perspective that making
data available needs to be incentivised. Funding is one incentive, but it is important that
researchers are credited for their data and that making data available will increase the
author’s visibility, in other words the data should be easily citable.
It is also clear that, whilst publishers, in principle, are open to further integration of
data and publications, there are challenges associated with ensuring the quality and
longevity of the data submitted. Accepting and storing data submitted in supplementary
files can be hugely demanding on publishers’ resources. There is also the question over
what level of data, as illustrated in the ‘Gray’s Pyramid, see Graph 1, a publication
should accept and in what manifestation.
There are exciting developments in publishing in relation to data, such as datapublications
whose main aim is to describe available datasets. Publishers are investing
in developing services to enrich publications with data and are doing so in collaboration
with public archive services such as libraries and data centres.
Data centres play an important role in the long term storage of data and it can be
surmised that libraries have a supporting role in this landscape, whether that be in
supporting researchers in storing their data or ensuring that data remains available to
and is discoverable by the end user when starting up new research projects. It is clear
that, for libraries, a priority is to ensure that quality data can always be accessed easily
by their users.
Opportunities for Data Exchange (ODE) –www.ode-project.eu 81