Beagrie.com

An interesting press release from last week particularly when seen in the context of previous announcements on this blog: an emerging trend of journals and publishers linking to open-access data repositories?

Extract: Amsterdam, 24 February 2010 – Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, announced today that the data library   PANGAEA – Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data – and Elsevier have implemented reciprocal linking between their respective content in earth system research. Research data sets deposited at PANGAEA are now automatically linked to the corresponding articles in Elsevier journals on its electronic platform ScienceDirect and vice versa. This linking functionality also provides a credit mechanism for research data sets deposited in this data library.

Dr. Hannes Grobe, data librarian of PANGAEA at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research commented, “Through this fruitful cooperation, science is better supported and the flow of data into trusted archives is promoted. The interaction of a publisher with an Open Access data repository is ideal to serve the requirements of modern research by diminishing the loss of research data. It also enables the reader of a publication to verify the scientific findings and to use the data in his own work. The Elsevier-PANGAEA cooperation consequently follows the most recent recommendations of funding bodies and international organizations, such as the OECD, about access to research data from public funding.”

“Our goal is to continuously improve user experiences, and this is one of the ways we make this happen” added Dr. Christiane Barranguet, executive publisher at Elsevier. “This is the beginning of a new way of managing, preserving and sharing data from earth system research. It also highlights the value ScienceDirect can deliver on its platform by giving researchers the papers they need and helping them put those papers in context, delivering unique value to user.”

Working with the scientific community to preserve scientific research data is also an objective of the Elsevier Content Innovation programme. Through this agreement and development Elsevier supports long-term storage, wide availability and preservation of large research data sets.