Publishers engaging with data 'publication'

[Brian McMahon]

I was involved in an interesting workshop in Southampton last week, run by the UK Digital Curation Centre. It was the eighth in their series of "Research Data Management Forum"s, and took the theme "Engaging with the Publishers". Some of the presentations are available at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/research-da ... publishers and there's a very good blog summarising the event at http://citingbytes.blogspot.co.uk/

One comment that John Helliwell made to me recently was that there is little or no distinction drawn in high-level policy documents (such as those from Research Councils UK or the EU High-Level Group) between raw and processed data, and the different strategies that need to be applied to these different types. I think this is partly because different disciplines have different ideas of what constitutes "raw" versus "processed"; and in some fields "processed" data is the "raw" input into some other downstream analysis. However, there is some awareness of the differences amongst publishers, and a recent report from STM (the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers) has developed the notion of a "data pyramid", that is often used as a point of reference at publisher-led meetings dealing with data management. See http://www.stm-assoc.org/integration-of ... lications/ and the full report at http://www.stm-assoc.org/2011_12_5_ODE_ ... ations.pdf for a useful summary of the approach being followed (or at least tentatively explored) by a large sector of the publishing industry.

Brian