ASLO Takes a Next Step toward Open Science: Introducing Data Papers, a New Article Type in Limnology & Oceanography Letters

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&O and 38% of papers in L&O-Methods were published OpenOnline, while all of L&O-Letters articles were open access. However, another equally important component of open science—online publication of the data reported in our papers—is a work in progress. The rationales for publishing data are compelling, and include: (1) making publicly funded research available to the public, (2) allowing others to ask new questions of our data, (3) advancing research and innovation through synthetic analyses across studies, and (4) fostering reproducibility of research (Borgman 2012). ASLO is strongly supportive of open data. For example, publication in L&O-Letters requires that authors place the data and metadata associated with all of its publications in a “public repository that issues a DOI so that future readers can access the exact version of the dataset used in the study.” To guide authors in this relatively new practice in science, one of us recently published a step-by-step guide for placing data and metadata in a public data repository that can be used for any research article or journal (Soranno 2019). Open data will become the norm, not only because of mandates from government funding agencies and push from scientific societies and publishers (Michener 2015), but also because it leads to a more robust and reproducible science. Although data publication leads to increased visibility and citations of our work (Piwowar et al. 2007), members of the scientific community have not universally embraced the open-data mandate. A survey of 500 papers published in high-impact journals found that only 9% deposited the full data sets required by journal policy (Alsheikh-Ali et al. 2011). Resistance comes partly because of uncertainty about how our data will be used. Borgman (2012) explains the conundrum: “The farther removed from the data collection activity, the harder it is to make use of someone else's data. Thus, it is not surprising that concerns for the misinterpretation and misuse of data are common reasons that researchers give for not sharing.” Publishers have addressed this concern through the creation of a relatively new article type—the data article, an article that thoroughly describes a noteworthy, valuable, or novel data set, as well as entire journals devoted to publishing data articles. For example, Nature Research launched Scientific Data in 2014 to publish data articles (“descriptors”). Authors also have other outlets for publishing detailed descriptions of their published data in journals devoted to data papers, such as Geosciences Data Journal (Wiley), Data in Brief (Elsevier), and Earth System Science Data (Copernicus Publications). More recently, journals that publish traditional research articles have also begun to publish data articles. Data articles provide an opportunity for us, as data producers, to share essential information to minimize the likelihood that our published data will be misinterpreted, misrepresented, or misunderstood by others who use them. They also provide data producers with an avenue for getting credit for the major effort involved in not only collecting data, but in describing them effectively for reuse. Data articles describe the essentials of who produced the data; 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.