A message for the Twitteratti

Dudes.

I’m right here. On the blog.

Nothing is (seriously*) wrong with me.

Chill**.

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*i.e., beyond the usual.

**and yes, I am touched by all y’all’s concern for my well being. Thank you for that.

A new way to publish your dataset #OA waccaloons!

Elsevier has a new ….journal? I guess that is what it is.

Data in Brief

From the author guidelines:

Data in Brief provides a way for researchers to easily share and reuse each other’s datasets by
publishing data articles that:

Thoroughly describe your data, facilitating reproducibility. Make your data, which is often buried in supplementary material, easier to find. Increase traffic towards associated research articles and data, leading to more citations. Open up doors for new collaborations.
Because you never know what data will be useful to someone else, Data in Brief welcomes submissions that describe data from all research areas.

At the moment they only list Section Editors in Proteomics, Materials Science, Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, Engineering and Genomics. So yes, there will apparently be peer review of these datasets:

Because Data in Brief articles are pure descriptions of data they are reviewed differently than a typical research article. The Data in Brief peer review process focuses on data transparency.

Reviewers review manuscripts based on the following criteria:
Do the description and data make sense? Do the authors adequately explain its utility to the community? Are the protocol/references for generating data adequate? Data format (is it standard? potentially re-usable?) Does the article follow the Data in Brief template? Is the data well documented?

Data in Brief that are converted supplementary files submitted alongside a research article via another Elsevier journal are editorially reviewed….

Wait. What’s this part now?

Here’s what the guidelines at a regular journal, also published by Elsevier, have to say about the purpose of Data in Brief:

Authors have the option of converting any or all parts of their supplementary or additional raw data into one or multiple Data in Brief articles, a new kind of article that houses and describes their data. Data in Brief articles ensure that your data, which is normally buried in supplementary material, is actively reviewed, curated, formatted, indexed, given a DOI and publicly available to all upon publication. Authors are encouraged to submit their Data in Brief article as an additional item directly alongside the revised version of their manuscript. If your research article is accepted, your Data in Brief article will automatically be transferred over to Data in Brief where it will be editorially reviewed and published in the new, open access journal, Data in Brief. Please note an open access fee is payable for publication in Data in Brief.

emphasis added.

So, for those of you that want to publish the data underlying your regular research article, instead of having it go unheeded in a Supplementary Materials pdf you now have the opportunity to pay an Open Access fee to get yourself a DOI for it.

You meet the nicest people on the science blogs

I was recently reminded, again, that the science folks on social media are pretty good folks to know. If you happen to notice that you will be travel overlapping in a city with someone you only know via the blogs or the Twitters, reach out.

It won’t always be possible* to meet up for a coffee, beer or meal, sure. But if you can work out the scheduling, it is well worth it.

In other news, I finally got a chance to meet Dr. Rubidium. So that was nice.

In case you missed it on the twitters, she’s Scientopia’s latest newly hired Assistant Professor, starting in the fall.

@David_Dobbs I'm joining @stedwardsu as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry

— Raychelle Burks (@DrRubidium) February 11, 2016

Please join me in congratulating her, if you missed the chance to do so on Twitter.

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*and yeah, I know, creepers are on social sci-media too. Be circumspect. Get references from people you trust if you have to! 🙂