Data journals: incentivizing data access and documentation within the scholarly communication system

摘要

Data journals provide strong incentives for data creators to verify, document and disseminate theirdata. They also bring data access and documentation into the mainstream of scholarly communication,rewarding data creators through existing mechanisms of peer-reviewed publication and citation tracking.These same advantages are not generally associated with data repositories, or with conventional journals’data-sharing mandates. This article describes the unique advantages of data journals. It also examinesthe data journal landscape, presenting the characteristics of 13 data journals in the fields of biology,environmental science, chemistry, medicine and health sciences. These journals vary considerably in size,scope, publisher characteristics, length of data reports, data hosting policies, time from submission to firstdecision, article processing charges, bibliographic index coverage and citation impact. They are similar,however, in their peer review criteria, their open access license terms and the characteristics of theireditorial boards.