Register

This FREE pre-conference workshop is open to anyone who registers and has an interest in text and data mining.  To help us gauge the attendance, please register for the workshop.

Note: It is essential to bring a laptop to do the hands-on exercises.

About the Workshop

Broader release and reuse of scientific data require credit mechanisms that reward scientists for releasing their data, and peer evaluation mechanisms. Several online publications dedicated to describing and linking to datasets have emerged to help address these issues.

Scientific Data, published by Nature Publishing Group, is a peer-reviewed open access journal publishing Data Descriptors (DDs) as its primary article type. DDs describe, in detail, experimental and observational datasets. Metadata files associated with the datasets are also provided in a standardised format – ISA-tab – that facilitates sharing of metadata across platforms and scientific domains. The peer-review and editorial process includes curation of metadata, for consistency and to aid discovery of content.

This publication format and process, developed for Scientific Data, are optimised to maximise data interpretation and reuse. Bespoke peer-review guidelines for datasets, data deposition policies and a list of more than 60 approved data repositories have been developed to support the process. Editors and reviewers assess the reuse value of data, the technical rigour of the procedures used to generate the data, long-term availability of data, and the completeness of data description. These acceptance criteria aim to promote quality in data publishing and reuse. Scientific Data supports and promotes community-endorsed data repositories, and has partnerships with general data repositories to facilitate open sharing and linking of data.

Ubiquity Press publishes a range of discipline-specific open access journals that contain descriptions of datasets, including Open Health Data. Open Health Data incentivises and rewards researchers to share health data through a low-barrier publishing process. The journal is fully peer reviewed, and works with a range of repositories around the world. A recent project carried out with the Wellcome Trust hosted Public Health Research Data Forum involved the publication of a diverse range of datasets, many involving highly sensitive data, which provided the journal with an opportunity to reassess and adapt its editorial policies and procedures.

This session will help attendees understand current data-publishing journals and trends and help them understand the editorial processes on Scientific Data and Open Health Data. It will include discussion of published DDs (Data Descriptor) “case studies” including research on drought and human dengue virus.:

1. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system, Hao et al., Scientific Data 1:140001 | DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2014.1
2. A global compendium of human dengue virus occurrence, Messina et al., Scientific Data 1:140004 | DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2014.4

To better support open science, both Scientific Data and Ubiquity Press are interested in the views of attendees on their own data publishing needs and goals.