IQSS and PKP to Develop Data Sharing System for Journals

The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) will be teaming up with Stanford University’s Public Knowledge Project (PKP) on a two-year project to make data sharing and preservation an intrinsic part of the scholarly publication process.  Funded by a one million dollar Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant, the two groups plan to integrate Stanford’s Open Journal Systems [Willinsky 2005] with Harvard’s Dataverse Network™ software [King 2007; Crosas 2011], two well-established open source systems.  As IQSS’s Director of Product Development, Dr. Mercé Crosas, explains, “This project will help establish a formal linkage between scholarly publications and the underlying research data, thus increasing replicability and reusability of previous studies to verify and advance science."

As data sharing technology and data management practices have developed over the past decade, academic journals have come under pressure to disseminate the data associated with published articles.  In response, the originators of the project decided to concentrate their efforts on the needs of journal publishers and editors, in addition to the researchers and archivists who have been the primary recipients of previous data-sharing technology.

In collaboration with PKP, the IQSS product development team led by Dr. Crosas will help build the needed technology and create awareness among journal editors and publishers regarding the importance of data sharing and preservation.  Their efforts will enable the duplication and verification essential to scholarly work.  Gary King, PI on this project and Director of IQSS, asserts that “the immediate impact of the project will be to increase the number of readily replicable articles published, and the number of social science journals that adopt best data management and citation practices. The broadest impacts of the project will be to increase the pace of discovery in the social sciences, and to broaden the research opportunities for younger scholars.”

Links:

• Dataverse Network Project
• Public Knowledge Project-- Open Journal Systems

Software sources:

Crosas, M., The Dataverse Network™: An Open-Source Application for Sharing, Discovering and Preserving Data, D-lib Magazine 17(1/2). 2011.

King, G. “An Introduction to the Dataverse Network as an Infrastructure for Data Sharing.” Sociological Methods and Research, 32(2), 173–199. 2007.

Willinsky, J.. Open Journal Systems: An example of open source software for journal management and publishing. Library Hi-Tech 23 (4), 504-519. 2005.