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Science is moving quickly toward open access of peer-reviewed scientific articles and the data they report. This change began in the early 1990s with publication of digital editions of articles accessible freely to anyone with an internet connection. Today, different models of Open Access exist. Publication of the most common (Direct Open Access) has grown 30% annually since 2000, and exceeded 190,000 articles in 2009 (Laakso et al. 2011). ASLO has recognized this important trend and embraced Open Access publication by making open-access options available to authors in two of its journals (Limnology and Oceanography and Limnology and Oceanography Methods), while also launching a fully open-access journal, Limnology and Oceanography Letters, in 2016. In 2018, 36% of papers in L when, where, and how they were produced; the purposes for which they were produced; detailed and thorough descriptions of the methods used; and steps of quality control and assurance. Data articles are peer-reviewed, have unique digital identifiers, are indexed (e.g., in Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and PubMed), and are cited. For example, the impact factor of Scientific Data was 5.9 in 2018 (https://www.nature.com/sdata/about/faq#q6). Therefore, data articles give us professional credit on par with that we receive for publishing traditional scientific articles. Our purpose here is to announce that the ASLO Board of Directors has accepted founding Editor-in-Chief Patricia Soranno's proposal that L&O-Letters publish Data Articles as a new article type. We have begun the process to open the journal for submissions of data articles by the end of 2019. As far as we are aware, this will provide the first dedicated outlet for publication of data articles in the aquatic sciences. We encourage you to begin thinking now about submissions to attract and facilitate use or reuse of your data sets. Stay tuned for an upcoming editorial in L&O-Letters that will provide more detail about the structure of Data Articles, criteria for publication, and how they will advance ASLO's commitment to open science. We welcome questions and comments to loletters-eic@aslo.org.
Cloern et al. (Wed,) studied this question.