Many publishers have implemented open data policies and have publicly declared their support of data as a valuable component of the research process. But to give credit to researchers and incentivize behavior for data publishing, the community needs to promote proper citation of data. Many publishers have also endorsed the FORCE Data Citation Principles, Scholix, and other data citation initiatives, but still we have not seen implementation or benefits of proper data citation indexing at the journal level. Make Data Count provides incentives and aims to show researchers the value of their research data by displaying data usage and citation metrics. However, to be able to expose citations, publishers need to promote and index data citations with Crossref so that repositories utilizing the Make Data Count infrastructure can pull citations, evaluate use patterns, and display them publicly.
So, how as a publisher, can you support open research data and incentivize researchers to think about data like articles?
- Implement policies that advise researchers to deposit data to a stable repository that gives a persistent, citable identifier for the dataset
- Guide researchers to cite their own data or other data related to their article in their references list
- Acknowledge data citations in the article, data availability statement, and/or reference list, tag it as a data citation, and send this in XML to Crossref via the references list or in the relationships type. Crossref has put together a simple guide here.
