Objectives: (1) to identify common errors in data organization and metadata completeness that would preclude a “reader” from being able to interpret and re-use the data for a new purpose; and (2) to develop a set of best practices derived from these common errors that would guide researchers in creating more usable data products that could be readily shared, interpreted, and used. Methods: We used directed qualitative content analysis to assess and categorize data and metadata errors identified by peer reviewers of data papers published in the Ecological Society of America’s (ESA) Ecological Archives. Descriptive statistics provided the relative frequency of the errors identified during the peer review process. Results: There were seven overarching error categories: Collection & Organization, Assure, Description, Preserve, Discover, Integrate, and Analyze/Visualize. These categories represent errors researchers regularly make at each stage of the Data Life Cycle. Collection & Organization and Description errors were some of the most common errors, both of which occurred in over 90% of the papers.  Conclusions: Publishing data for sharing and reuse is error prone, and each stage of the Data Life Cycle presents opportunities for mistakes. The most common errors occurred when the researcher did not provide adequate metadata to enable others to interpret and potentially re-use the data. Fortunately, there are ways to minimize these mistakes through carefully recording all details about study context, data collection, QA/ QC, and analytical procedures from the beginning of a research project and then including this descriptive information in the metadata.

Sharing data is increasingly considered to be an important part of the scientific process. Making your data publicly available allows original results to be reproduced and new analyses to be conducted. While sharing your data is the first step in allowing reuse, it is also important that the data be easy to understand and use. We describe nine simple ways to make it easy to reuse the data that you share and also make it easier to work with it yourself. Our recommendations focus on making your data understandable, easy to analyze, and readily available to the wider community of scientists.

Government datasets are political in themselves and their use is under the magnifying glass, says Tim Davies

Experts see increased collaboration as a step toward technological progress.

A study providing new insights into the citation boost from open data has been released in preprint form on PeerJ by Dryad researchers Heather Piwowar and Todd Vision. The researchers looked at tho…

The importance of data sharing has become a mantra within the science research community. However, sharing has not been as easy (or as readily adopted) as advocates have suggested. Questions of privacy, individual scientist’s rights to their research, and industry-academia divides have been significant hurdles. This article looks at the history of the debates and problems associated with data access that occurred during the ‘human genome wars’ and their aftermath as a way to explore some of the challenges facing diverse research communities.

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We provide evidence for the status quo in economics with respect to data sharing using a unique data set with 488 hand-collected observations randomly taken fro

Documentation for the Open Data Census application

PLOS Blogs Network PLOS is a nonprofit, Open Access publisher empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a…

Following New York City's lead, Madison passes an open data ordinance and launches an open data platform to spur civic engagement and economic development.

Surprise, surprise, surprise!

"The GOKb cloud service will provide data for “subscribed resources” from a higher education perspective. It will include data such as publication information, related organizations, and model licences, and will be accessible across all US and UK academic libraries."

It has been a while since I last posted. December was a pretty crazy month and I’ve been working on some excellent projects (more to come on the blog in a few weeks). In the meantime, a colle…