Cultural Change in Data Publishing Is Essential

Stakeholders across the globe have stressed the urgent need to improve the accessibility and fitness for use of biodiversity data. Huang and colleagues (2013) echoed this concern in BioScience, but argued against the data-paper concept as an appropriate mechanism to encourage the publishing of biodiversity data. We agree wholeheartedly with Huang and colleagues (2013) that “a joint data-publishing and -archiving policy by databases and journals” (p. 5) should be at the heart of the response to these needs. Only approaches that lead to stable, long-term access to well-described, high-quality data sets will be successful. We also believe, however, that data papers are fully compatible with this solution and that Huang and colleagues (2013) misunderstood or left unattended several key characteristics of the data-paper concept. A data paper is a scholarly journal publication whose primary purpose is to describe a data set or a group of data sets, rather than to report a research investigation (Chavan and Penev 2011). Therefore, it contains facts about data, not hypotheses and arguments in support of those hypotheses based on data, as are found in a conventional research article. Its purposes are threefold: to provide a citable journal publication that brings scholarly credit to data publishers; to describe the data through structured, human-readable extended metadata; and to bring the existence of the data to the attention of the scholarly community.