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Barriers to comprehensive reference availability

Two significant barriers prevent comprehensive reference availability through Crossref.

The first barrier

First, two-thirds of Crossref’s publisher-members, in particular the smaller ones, do not submit references along with the other details of their publications. Many of these published works are of types (e.g. abstracts, editorials and news items) that lack any references.  However, while the number of non-submitted references associated with other publications from these publishers is not known, it is likely to be substantial.

Ironically, quite a number of publishers have their Crossref reference status option set to ‘Open’, and yet fail to submit any references!

All publishers who use Crossref DOIs and submit metadata describing their works to Crossref should be strongly encouraged to start submitting associated reference lists if these exist.  Crossref have confirmed that it is easy to do, with or without membership of Crossref’s free and beneficial Cited-by Service that provides publishers with statistics on the citations of their own publications.  Help can be provided by Crossref Support (support@crossref.org).

The second barrier

The second barrier to full reference availability is created by publishers that submit references to Crossref, but do not presently make them open. Elsevier is by far the largest member of this group, which also includes the American Chemical Society, IEEE and Wolters Kluwer Health.

It is both quick and easy for a publisher to change its preference setting and request that all the references associated with its DOI prefixes are made open – all it requires is an email request to support@crossref.org.  But without such a request, the references will be remain in the default ‘Limited’ status.

References that are not associated with Crossref

There are, of course, many scholarly publications, for example preprints in repositories such as arXiv, and journal articles and monographs from small academic publishers in the Humanities, that do not have Digital Object Identifiers issued by Crossref.  There are also an increasing number of datasets in repositories such as Dryad that have associated references to the scholarly literature, but whose DOIs are issued by DataCite.  None of these submit references to Crossref where they can be made available via the Crossref API, and separate additional measures will be required to capture and share their references with the community.

 

 

 

 

IBRG projects to facilitate data publication and data citation

In the previous post, I outlined reasons why researchers don’t publish data, presented as evidence to the Royal Society’s Policy Study “Science as a Public Enterprise” Call for Evidence.  Here, I summarize activities by members of my Image Bioinformatics Research Group (IBRG) at Oxford University to facilitate data publication and data citation, and thus to help catalyze a cultural shift to a situation in which data publication is as natural a part of research life as is undertaking experiments.

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Data management services and data repositories

We are developing tools and services to assist researchers in their local data management, for their own personal benefit, while facilitating automated data submission to appropriate institutional or subject-specific data repositories, in ways that fit with their normal working practices and impose as little as possible in terms of cognitive overhead – what we term sheer curation.  These include the two-stage data management services we are currently funded to develop by the University Modernization Fund through the JISC DataFlow Project, namely (a) DataStage, a private local data management file system, with automated backup, Web access, and security access control, for use by individual research groups, and (b) DataBank, a cloud-deployable data repository for use by universities, research institutes or large research consortia.  These open source services will be made available for installation by third parties on the Eduserv academic cloud and elsewhere, as required by research groups, institutions and universities both in the UK and internationally.  We seek early adopters!

Curation by addition

For automated data submissions from DataStage to DataBank, that will use the SWORDv2 repository submission protocol to standardize data package ingest, we are intentionally lowering the barriers in terms of metadata requirements for initial data submission, with the the possibility of enriching the metadata at a later date – what we call curation by addition – in order to kick-start the cultural sea change required for data deposition to become routine.  We are trying to avoid the best – the requirement for perfect and complete metadata – becoming the enemy of the good – data publication by any means.

Dryad

We are, through the JISC Dryad-UK Project, working to promote the Dryad Data Repository, a domain-specific repository for biological datasets linked to peer-reviewed journal articles, by bringing additional publishers and journals on board, and enabling Dryad metadata to be published as open linked data.

SWORD

We are also promoting the adoption of SWORDv2 repository communication protocol for data package wrapping, to permit automated deposit to DataBank, Dryad or other SWORD-compliant repositories, and the exchange of metadata between them.

SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies

To enable Dryad, DataBank and similar repository metadata to be published as open linked data, we are creating appropriate data description and data citation ontologies, including FaBiO and CiTO4Data, as part of our suite of SPAR Ontologies, and are using them to provide mappings from the DataCite XML Metadata Kernel to RDF.

Data citation

We are working with DataCite to assign DOIs to Dryad and DataBank datasets, so that data publications become citable, gaining academic credit for the data depositor.

These data citations, when they exist, will fit naturally within the Open Citations Corpus, a collection of some 3.4 million bibliographic citations from within PubMed Central that we have recently established as open linked data, as part of the JISC Open Citations Project.

We have also worked to establish best practice for citing data publications from within the literature, and with one open access journal publisher to influence their Data Publishing Policies and Guidelines to Authors regarding data citation, as detailed in earlier posts on this blog.

Tools for metadata curation

The above tools and services are generic.  Specifically in the biomedical area, we are developing MIIDI, a Minimal Information standard for reporting an Infectious Disease Investigation, to specify the metadata that should for completeness accompany such an investigation, and have recently developed MIIDI Forms, a web tool that facilitates the entry of such metadata, that involves interaction with appropriate web services to enable autocompleting of bibliographic information and specification of geo-coordinates for place names, and permits automated look-up of ontology terms from the NCBI BioPortal

Open Research Reports

We are working to create Open Research Reports, open access structured digital abstracts in both human- and machine-readable form that describe datasets or journal articles that relate to infectious disease, based on MIIDI and to be published in an instant data journal format with DOIs to permit referencing and citation.

Tools for creating data management plans

We have recently started working with the Digital Curation Centre to help improve their DMPonline data management planning tool for creating the data management plans increasingly required to accompany grant applications, and useful for managing the flow of data from funded projects.  If our current funding application is successful, this work will be carried forward in the OXFORD DMPonline Project, in which, in addition to adoption, adaption, customization and integration of the tool for use by University of Oxford researchers, we will develop the following generic improvements to the tool that will be fed back to the DCC as open source enhancements for general use across UK academia and internationally:

a)     creation of DaMO, a simple data management ontology,

b)     use of DaMO to create RDF metadata for data management plans,

c)     SWORDv2-wrapping of data management plans for repository submission, and

d)     creation of DMPBank, a DataBank instance specifically tailored for archiving and publishing data management plans.

Pensoft Journals policy and author guidelines on data publication and citation

In a recent blog post, Heather Piwowar, in discussing the advantages of citing datasets in the reference list of the article, said “No journals have standardized on this approach so far”. However, Pensoft Journals, a publisher that specializes in publishing biodiversity and biological systematics papers, and that has taken the lead in promoting the publication of datasets with DOIs, has exactly such a policy.

Recently, in response to my Data Citation Best Practice Discussion Document [1] discussed in the preceding blog post, I was invited to work with Pensoft Journals to contribute to and help revise their now-published Data Publishing Policies and Guidelines for Biodiversity Data [2].  This 34-page paper has a three-page section on how to cite data in Pensoft Journals.

While recognising that citations of Genbank and similar bioinformatics datasets are by custom made by placing the database accession number somewhere in the text, with no entry in the reference list of the article, we make the following generic recommendation:

“Data citations may relate either to the author’s own data, or to data created and published by others (“third-party data”). In the former case, the dataset may have been previously published, or may be published for the first time in association with the article that is now citing it. All these types of data should, for consistency, be cited in the same manner.

“As is the norm when citing another research article, any citation of a data publication, including a citation of one’s own data, should always have two components:

  • An in-text citation statement containing an in-text reference pointer that directs the reader to a formal data reference in the paper’s reference list.

and

  • A formal data reference within the article’s reference list.

“The data reference in the article’s reference list should contain the minimal components recommended in the DataCite Metadata Kernel v2.0 specification. In DataCite terms: Creator PublicationYear Title Publisher Identifier; alternatively (but meaning the same thing): Author PublicationYear Title DataRepositoryName DOI. These components should be presented in whatever format and punctuation style the journal specifies for its references. The following example demonstrates in general terms what is required.

“In-text citation:

This paper uses data from the [name] data repository at http://dx.doi.org/***** (Jones et al. 2008a), first described in Jones et al. 2008b.

“Data reference in reference list:

Jones A, Bloggs B, Smith C (2008a). Title of data package. Repository name. doi:*****.

“Article reference in reference list:

Jones A, Saul D, Smith C (2008b). Title of journal article. Journal Volume: Pages. doi:###. ”

Pensoft also recommends that the in-text data citation statement in Pensoft journals should be included in the body of the paper, in a separate section named Data Resources situated after the Material and Methods section.  More details are given in the paper [2].

Furthermore, Pensoft has reached an agreement for cooperation in data hosting and developing of data publishing workflows with GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, with the Dryad Data Repository and with the Consortium for Barcode of Life.

Clearly, these Pensoft data citation recommendations, which work fine for on-line journals without a numerical limit on the number of citations, would not be feasible in journal articles with a strict limit to the number of citations, which is why Heather’s emphasis of exploring alternative ways for data citation in such cases is important.

[1]     David Shotton (2011) Data Citation Best Practice Discussion Document. Google Docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kF8-faB72l4dKTLEyx6Z5cIabk68GrJ9GraCtWnK0qQ/edit?hl=en_GB&authkey=CPPW46wL#.  

[2]     Penev L, Mietchen D, Chavan V, Hagedorn G, Remsen D, Smith V, Shotton D (2011). Pensoft Data Publishing Policies and Guidelines for Biodiversity Data. Pensoft Publishers, http://www.pensoft.net/J_FILES/Pensoft_Data_Publishing_Policies_and_Guidelines.pdf.

How to cite data

As an approach towards developing best practice for data citation, I recently wrote a Data Citation Best Practice Discussion Document that is available on Google Docs, and that I have now slightly revised to Version 2 [1].

In that document, I first compared what is recommended by DataCite [2] and by Altman and King [3] with what currently practised by the Dryad Data Repository and what presently occurs ‘in the wild’ in a handful of journal articles that reference Dryad datasets.  I then proposed some ‘internal’ recommendations for Dryad to adopt, and concluded with draft Data Citation Best Practice Recommendations.  As I say in the preface to the document:

“Since Dryad is pioneering data management in terms of data resources that are linked to journal articles, it is to be hoped that by first developing citation best practice in the Dryad context we can thereby catalyse its wider spread.  If we can thus agree what such best practice should be among the Dryad community and implement such best practice proposals, we can then promote such practices within the wider scholarly community.”

I realized that much of the confusion and disagreement concerning the best method of citing data resources within earlier e-mail threads resulted from a conflation of ideas about two entities which in the conventional citation of journal articles are quite distinct:

  • the in-text citation containing an in-text reference pointer, e.g. “this paper builds upon the work of Jones et al. [15].”     and
  • the actual reference to Jones et al. within the article’s reference list, e.g. “[15] Jones A, Bloggs B and Smith C (2008). Title. JournalName
    14:132-134. doi:*****.”

Thus, in an e-mail I wrote on 27 April, where I said

“Excellent, but what we really want is for the data citations to be included in the reference list along with the bibliographic citations, following the DataCite model: Creator (PublicationYear): Title. Version. Publisher. ResourceType. Identifier “

. . . I should also have stressed the need for explicit in-text citations that denote such references.

All that is explained within the Google Docs paper.  In that paper I also proposed having a separate Data Resources section within the body text of a journal article, in which data resource citations can be gathered.  That does not preclude these resources also being cited, where appropriate, within the Methods and Materials or Results sections of the paper, but is designed to put data resource citations “on the map”, so to speak, as important new publication performative acts.

It is not appropriate, in my mind, for data citations to be included in the Acknowledgements section of a paper, which is designed for acknowledging contributions to the work from people and funding agencies, even if Thomson Reuters has developed methods to parse such entries, since they also have well-established mechanisms for harvesting proper (data) references from the reference list.

All the ontological terms required to mark up in-text reference pointers and their textual contexts, references, reference lists, etc., to permit automated detection and harvesting of data citations and references, are available as RDF within the SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies (http://purl.org/spar/), which were designed precisely to facilitate such work.

Since writing my Data Citation Best Practice Discussion Document, I was invited (on a purely voluntary non-commercial basis, I should add!) to work with Pensoft Journals, a publisher that specialises in publishing biodiversity and biological systematics papers, and that has taken the lead in promoting the publication of datasets with DOIs, to contribute to and help revise their now-published Data Publishing Policies and Guidelines for Biodiversity Data [4].  This 34-page paper has a three-page section on how to cite data in Pensoft Journals, which I discuss in the next blog post, and which I am pleased to say includes all the recommendations discussed above.

[1]     David Shotton (2011) Data Citation Best Practice Discussion Document. Google Docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kF8-faB72l4dKTLEyx6Z5cIabk68GrJ9GraCtWnK0qQ/edit?hl=en_GB&authkey=CPPW46wL#.

[2]    The DataCite Metadata Kernel version 2.0 (2011). http://datacite.org/schema/DataCite-MetadataKernel_v2.0.pdf.

[3]    Micah Altman and Gary King (2007). A proposed standard for the scholarly citation of quantitative data. D-Lib Magazine. 13. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/altman/03altman.html.

[4]     Penev L, Mietchen D, Chavan V, Hagedorn G, Remsen D, Smith V, Shotton D (2011). Pensoft Data Publishing Policies and Guidelines for Biodiversity Data. Pensoft Publishers, http://www.pensoft.net/J_FILES/Pensoft_Data_Publishing_Policies_and_Guidelines.pdf.

Questions of granularity – Dryad’s use of DataCite DOIs for data citation, and the Annotation Ontology

DataCite is an international organisation, founded in 2009, which promotes the use of DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for published datasets, in order to establish easier access to research data, to increase acceptance of research data as legitimate contributions in the scholarly record, and to support data archiving to permit results to be verified and re-purposed for future study.

Its founding members were the British Library; the Technical Information Center of Denmark; TU Delft Library; the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI); California Digital Library; Purdue University; and the German National Library of Science and Technology. Since its foundation, it has been joined by several other leading organisations from around the world, and it therefore provides a stable basis for the ongoing use of DOIs for data.

This recent availability of DOIs from DataCite for the identification of data entities has made all the difference to data repositories wishing to give unique global identifiers to their data holdings, since DOIs are widely recognised and respected throughout the academic world, because of their widespread prior use for identifying journal articles, made possible by CrossRef.

However, in their recent discussion paper Data Citation and Linking, published on 8th June 2011, Alex Ball and Monica Duke of UKOLN at the University of Bath ask:

“At what granularity should data be made citable? If single datasets are given identifiers, what about collections of datasets, or subsets of data?”

Individual data files and metadata documents will, of course, have their own unique internal identifiers within any data repository, but may not have externally resolvable identifiers such as DOIs.  Practice varies.

This post is to explain how DOIs are employed in the Dryad Data Repository, that specializes in publishing data linked to peer-reviewed biological journal articles, since it is both elegant and addresses at least some of the issues raised by Alex and Monica.

The Dryad DOI usage policy is described at https://www.nescent.org/wg_dryad/DOI_Usage, and involves assigning unique DOIs to each version of every data package, and to each version of every data file, in a principled and easy-to-understand manner. In summary:

  • Each data package is given a DataCite DOI, which can be versioned by adding “.2”, “.3”, etc. after the original DOI to create new DOIs for new versions of the same data package.
  • Within each data package, each data file has a unique DOI defines by suffixing the data package DOI with “/1”, “/2”. etc., with versions indicated as for data packages.

Thus the third version of the second data file in the second version of a Dryad data package would have a DOI of the form doi:10.5061/dryad.1234.2/2.3.

One might argue that it would result in an awfully large number of DOIs if a single data package was made up of thousands of data files. True, but numbers themselves are limitless and free, and the cost of a DataCite DOI is small relative to the cost of data creation and preservation. The real problem at present is lack of identifiable, citable data entities within repositories – to have so many that the cost of DOIs becomes an issue should be regarded as an achievement, not a problem!

Dryad does not have a mechanism for assigning identifiers to a portion of a data file (“a subset of data”), and DOIs are probably not the correct identifiers for that purpose, since they are primarily designed for citation and resource discovery.

A more appropriate method for identifying portions of a data file, or of any other digital object or document, is to use the Annotation Ontology (AO) developed by Paolo Ciccarese of Harvard University, described at http://code.google.com/p/annotation-ontology/wiki/Homepage. AO can be used to identify and annotate portions of a wide variety of resources such as HTML, PDF, Word, Excel, XML documents, images, videos, databases, web services, experimental data and metadata files. Paolo is currently working with a group in Harvard that focuses on biodiversity, who are using OA to address databases and data, and he anticipates publishing version 2.0 of AO in September.

DataCite2RDF – Mapping DataCite Metadata Scheme Terms to ontologies

The DataCite Metadata Kernel version 2.0 [1] specifies the minimal metadata, and optional metadata, that should accompany a DataCite DOI for the identification of a published data entity. Within the Metadata Kernel document there is an XML mapping of these metadata terms, using DCMI Metadata Terms, and an example encoded in XML.

Silvio Peroni and I recently published a mapping of the DataCite metadata elements to RDF using ontology terms [2], in order to enable data repositories to publish DataCite metadata in RDF as Open Linked Data, enabling these metadata to be understood programmatically and integrated automatically with similar data from elsewhere.

Our mapping covers all the main terms, and the Relation Type sub-properties that describe the relationship of the related resource to the resource being registered, but does not address DataCite sub-terms, e.g. 2.2.1 nameIdentifierScheme.

Wherever possible, commonly used Dublin Core Elements, DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative) Metadata Terms, FOAF (Friend of a Friend Vocabulary) and PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) terms have been used.

These have been supplemented, as appropriate, by terms:

from FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records),

from the following SPAR (Semantic Publishing and Referencing) Ontologies:

                CiTO, Citation Typing Ontology

                FaBiO, FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology, and

CiTO4Data, an extension of CiTO for datasets that provides the properties cito4data:compiles and cito4data:isCompiledBy that the DataCite Metadata Kernel requires;

and from a new DataCite Ontology (http://purl.org/spar/datacite/) that we created to provide the following four object properties lacking in other Ontologies:

                    datacite:hasPrimaryIdentifier

                    datacite:hasAlternateIdentifier

                    datacite:hasRelatedIdentifier

                    datacite:hasPersonalIdentifier

Use of DCMI Metadata Terms in RDF

An object property has a class or a URI as its object, while a data property has a literal (e.g. text, number, date) as its object, and may have a W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) datatype qualifier, e.g. ^^xsd:date. (See http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-2/).

Many Dublin Core properties are not formally specified to be one or another, leading to potential confusion. In the following mapping, Dublin Core Elements are always used as data properties, while Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Metadata Terms are used either as data properties or as object properties, as helpfully specified by the Max Planck Digital Library in their document entitled How to use DCMI Metadata as linked data.  

In our DataCite2RDF mapping document [2], alternative mappings are given where appropriate, separated by semi-colons.  Both dc: and dcterms: properties are listed.  Preferred terms are shown bold.  RDF statements are given in Turtle notation.

Accompanying this DataCite2RDF mapping document, we published as Google docs both an RDF mapping of the DataCite XML example, and an RDF mapping of the metadata for a Dryad repository holding, showing how DataCite2RDF can be used for real data.

We welcome feedback on these documents: <david.shotton@zoo.ox.ac.uk> and <speroni@cs.unibo.it>.

[1]    The DataCite Metadata Kernel version 2.0 (2011). http://datacite.org/schema/DataCite-MetadataKernel_v2.0.pdf.

[2]     David Shotton and Silvio Peroni (2011). Mapping DataCite Metadata Scheme Terms (v2.0) to ontologies (DataCite2RDF). Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1paJgvmCMu3pbM4in6PjWAKO0gP-6ultii3DWQslygq4/edit?authkey=CMeV3tgF&hl=en_GB.