Data publications correlate with citation impact

Neuroscience and molecular biology have been generating large atasets over the past years that are reshaping how research is being conducted.In their wake, open data sharing has been singled out as a major challenge for the future of research. We conducted a comparative study of citations of data publications in both fields, showing that the average publication tagged with a data-related term by the NCBI MeSH(MedicalSubjectHeadings) curators achieves a significantly larger citation impact than the average in either field. We introduce a new metric, the data article citation index(DAC-index), to identify the most prolific authors among those data-related publications.The study is fully reproducible from an executable Rmd(RMarkdown)script to gether with all the citation datasets. We hope these results can encourage authors to more openly publish their data

SOUND SOFTWARE: TOWARDS SOFTWARE REUSE IN AUDIO AND MUSIC RESEARCH

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Integrating Research Data Management into Geographical Information Systems

Ocean modelling requires the production of high-fidelity computational meshes upon which to solve the equations of motion. The production of such meshes by hand is often infeasible, considering the complexity of the bathymetry and coastlines. The use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is therefore a key component to discretising the region of interest and producing a mesh appropriate to resolve the dynamics. However, all data associated with the production of a mesh must be provided in order to contribute to the overall recomputability of the subsequent simulation. This work presents the integration of research data management in QMesh, a tool for generating meshes using GIS. The tool uses the PyRDM library to provide a quick and easy way for scientists to publish meshes, and all data required to regenerate them, to persistent online repositories. These repositories are assigned unique identifiers to enable proper citation of the meshes in journal articles.Comment: Accepted, camera-ready version. To appear in the Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Semantic Digital Archives (http://sda2015.dke-research.de/), held in Pozna\'n, Poland on 18 September 2015 as part of the 19th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (http://tpdl2015.info/

Report on the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2)

This technical report records and discusses the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2). The report includes a description of the alternative, experimental submission and review process, two workshop keynote presentations, a series of lightning talks, a discussion on sustainability, and five discussions from the topic areas of exploring sustainability; software development experiences; credit & incentives; reproducibility & reuse & sharing; and code testing & code review. For each topic, the report includes a list of tangible actions that were proposed and that would lead to potential change. The workshop recognized that reliance on scientific software is pervasive in all areas of world-leading research today. The workshop participants then proceeded to explore different perspectives on the concept of sustainability. Key enablers and barriers of sustainable scientific software were identified from their experiences. In addition, recommendations with new requirements such as software credit files and software prize frameworks were outlined for improving practices in sustainable software engineering. There was also broad consensus that formal training in software development or engineering was rare among the practitioners. Significant strides need to be made in building a sense of community via training in software and technical practices, on increasing their size and scope, and on better integrating them directly into graduate education programs. Finally, journals can define and publish policies to improve reproducibility, whereas reviewers can insist that authors provide sufficient information and access to data and software to allow them reproduce the results in the paper. Hence a list of criteria is compiled for journals to provide to reviewers so as to make it easier to review software submitted for publication as a “Software Paper.

Improving transparency and scientific rigor in academic publishing.

Progress in basic and clinical research is slowed when researchers fail to provide a complete and accurate report of how a study was designed, executed, and the results analyzed. Publishing rigorous scientific research involves a full description of the methods, materials, procedures, and outcomes. Investigators may fail to provide a complete description of how their study was designed and executed because they may not know how to accurately report the information or the mechanisms are not in place to facilitate transparent reporting. Here, we provide an overview of how authors can write manuscripts in a transparent and thorough manner. We introduce a set of reporting criteria that can be used for publishing, including recommendations on reporting the experimental design and statistical approaches. We also discuss how to accurately visualize the results and provide recommendations for peer reviewers to enhance rigor and transparency. Incorporating transparency practices into research manuscripts will significantly improve the reproducibility of the results by independent laboratories

Reproducible Research: a Dissenting Opinion

Reproducible Research, the de facto title of a growing movement\ud within many scientific fields, would require the code, used to\ud generate the experimental results, be published along with any\ud paper. Probably the most compelling argument for this is that it is\ud simply following good scientific practice, established over the\ud years by the greats of science. It is further claimed that\ud misconduct is causing a growing crisis of confidence in science.\ud That, without this requirement being enforced, science would\ud inevitably fall into disrepute. This viewpoint is becoming\ud ubiquitous but here I offer a dissenting opinion. I contend that\ud the consequences are somewhat overstated. Misconduct is far from\ud solely a recent phenomenon; science has succeeded despite it.\ud Further, I would argue that the problem of public trust is more to\ud do with other factors. I would also contend that the effort\ud necessary to meet the movement's aims, and the general attitude it\ud engenders, would not serve any of the research disciplines well