Mercè Crosas and Collaborators Write Data Citation Manifesto

May 14, 2013
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At the Beyond the PDF 2 Conference in the Netherlands, IQSS Director of Data Science Mercè Crosas recently worked with colleagues on a unified statement on data citation. As it is important that study-related data be open and accessible, the team agreed that a concise set of principles must be established to encourage the publication of science data. The result of their collaboration, the Amsterdam Manifesto on Data Citation Principles, states that researchers should treat their data as citable sources and proposes eight principles on when and how you should reference data in research publications. These are not detailed implementations on data citation, but rather high-level principles that researchers, publishers, finding agencies and other constituents can easily agree on.

Crosas' own work at IQSS includes the standardization of data citation through her leadership of the Dataverse Network, a project that provides an open-source application for users to share, reference, and analyze research data. The data citation format generated for each data set in a Dataverse follows the data citation standard proposed by Altman and King 2007. She explains that, similar to the mission of the Dataverse Network Project, the intent of the Amsterdam Manifesto is to ensure that researchers are credited and potentially recognized and rewarded not only for the study results published in a scientific paper, but also for the data used to reach to those results. Through the proposed best practices, publication authors are also more accountable; by making their data available to their colleagues through public repositories, their study results are reproducible, and the transparency of the process validates their results.

The Amsterdam Manifesto on Data Citation Principles was declared a winner in the Force11 1K Challenge at Beyond the PDF 2, but Crosas says that the important work is only beginning for her and her colleagues—they need to build awareness and promote adoption of data citation across publishers and scholars. The group is now actively building support for the initiative: those interested in the Amsterdam Manifesto can read and endorse it at the Force11 website. Questions and comments can be posted at the site as well.

Visual Notes from Beyond the PDF 2 workshop by De Jongens van de Tekeningen
BTPDF2 notes