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Abstract:
During the past decade, the relevance of research
data has been rising significantly and the free and
open access not only to scientific results, but to research
datasets has been identified as a key issue by
the scientific community, funding agencies and the
public. As a consequence, there is a dynamic coevolution
of national and international guidelines on
management of and open access to research data (e.g.
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in
the Sciences and Humanities, G8 Open Data Charter,
EU Horizon 2020 Guidelines, etc.) and the development
of concepts to make data persistently accessible
and citable products of research.
Especially in permafrost and climate research, longterm
observatories and world-wide monitoring programmes
are essential to understand the impact of,
e.g., permafrost thaw on the Earth climate system
and consequently of climate change. Many datasets
are online available, via data portals or databases like,
e.g. at the National Snow and Ice Datacentre, the
GTN-P Database, NORPERM, Fluxnet, etc., but often
without the possibility to give the data providers
recognition and acknowledgement for contributing
data to a global network.
During the past years, the publication of research
datasets with assigned digital object identifier (DOI)
has emerged as best practice for citable and persistent
open access research data together with the deserved
recognition of the data providers. An important step
for the international acceptance and recognition of
DOI-referenced data publication is the‘Statement of
Commitment’of the Coalition for Data Publication
in the Earth and Space Sciences (COPDESS) that
aims to promote joint policies and procedures for the
publication and citation of data across Earth Science
journals. Key commitments, signed by many publishers
and data centres, are the acceptance of data
citations within reference lists of research articles,
the improvement of cross-references between journal
articles and published datasets, and the strong recommendation
to, whenever possible, store datasets in
appropriate, theme-specific data repositories, in which
data access and long-term preservation are guaranteed
and datasets are accompanied by sufficient metadata
to enable data reuse and discovery.
A comprehensive data description is essential for
data reuse. Data publication is mostly known as supplementary
material to scientific articles. Very often,
however, the data description in the journal article
is not sufficient for data reuse leading to many published
dataset not being used as much as they could
be. To improve this, many disciplines have developed
and are developing “Data Journals” that aim to publish
scientific articles with the detailed description of
datasets, data portals or data collections that will be
published along with the datasets. There are different
formats for articles in data journals, but all have in
common that they lack of any scientific interpretation
of the described datasets. For standalone publication
of datasets where neither format is an option, accompanying
data reports are a convenient and flexible
tool for enhanced data description.
