2014 Volume 57 Issue 9 Pages 629-640
As open access to journal articles has become more established in scholarly publishing, a number of Scientific Technical and Medical (STM) publishers are working to help provide open access to research data (open data). Researchers are generally supportive of data sharing and publication but they often lack incentives and mechanisms to share data effectively. For open data to help increase scientific reproducibility and reliability it must be more than just available - it should be understandable and reusable and, ideally, validated through peer review. Data journals and data articles have emerged as a new type of publication to help address these issues. Nature Publishing Group has developed a data journal in response to the needs of research funders and a survey of key stakeholders. The journal, Scientific Data, published its first articles in May 2014. The primary article type, the Data Descriptor, combines traditional scientific article content with structured machine-readable information, and has been devised to enable searching across different data types, linking of data to publications, and data-mining.
