An open future for ecological and evolutionary data?

As part of BioMed Central's open science mission, we are pleased to announce that two of our journals have integrated with the open data repository Dryad. Authors submitting their research to either BMC Ecology or BMC Evolutionary Biology will now have the opportunity to deposit their data directly into the Dryad archive and will receive a permanent, citable link to their dataset. Although this does not affect any of our current data deposition policies at these journals, we hope to encourage a more widespread adoption of open data sharing in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology by facilitating this process for our authors. We also take this opportunity to discuss some of the wider issues that may concern researchers when making their data openly available. Although we offer a number of positive examples from different fields of biology, we also recognise that reticence to data sharing still exists, and that change must be driven from within research communities in order to create future science that is fit for purpose in the digital age. This editorial was published jointly in both BMC Ecology and BMC Evolutionary Biology.

An open future for ecological and evolutionary data?

As part of BioMed Central's open science mission, we are pleased to announce that two of our journals have integrated with the open data repository Dryad. Authors submitting their research to either BMC Ecology or BMC Evolutionary Biology will now have the opportunity to deposit their data directly into the Dryad archive and will receive a permanent, citable link to their dataset. Although this does not affect any of our current data deposition policies at these journals, we hope to encourage a more widespread adoption of open data sharing in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology by facilitating this process for our authors. We also take this opportunity to discuss some of the wider issues that may concern researchers when making their data openly available. Although we offer a number of positive examples from different fields of biology, we also recognise that reticence to data sharing still exists, and that change must be driven from within research communities in order to create future science that is fit for purpose in the digital age. This editorial was published jointly in both BMC Ecology and BMC Evolutionary Biology.

A data citation roadmap for scientific publishers.

This article presents a practical roadmap for scholarly publishers to implement data citation in accordance with the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles (JDDCP), a synopsis and harmonization of the recommendations of major science policy bodies. It was developed by the Publishers Early Adopters Expert Group as part of the Data Citation Implementation Pilot (DCIP) project, an initiative of FORCE11.org and the NIH BioCADDIE program. The structure of the roadmap presented here follows the "life of a paper" workflow and includes the categories Pre-submission, Submission, Production, and Publication. The roadmap is intended to be publisher-agnostic so that all publishers can use this as a starting point when implementing JDDCP-compliant data citation. Authors reading this roadmap will also better know what to expect from publishers and how to enable their own data citations to gain maximum impact, as well as complying with what will become increasingly common funder mandates on data transparency.

How open science helps researchers succeed.

Open access, open data, open source and other open scholarship practices are growing in popularity and necessity. However, widespread adoption of these practices has not yet been achieved. One reason is that researchers are uncertain about how sharing their work will affect their careers. We review literature demonstrating that open research is associated with increases in citations, media attention, potential collaborators, job opportunities and funding opportunities. These findings are evidence that open research practices bring significant benefits to researchers relative to more traditional closed practices.