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Published March 2, 2018 | Published
Journal Article Open

Micropublication: incentivizing community curation and placing unpublished data into the public domain

Abstract

Large volumes of data generated by research laboratories coupled with the required effort and cost of curation present a significant barrier to inclusion of these data in authoritative community databases. Further, many publicly funded experimental observations remain invisible to curation simply because they are never published: results often do not fit within the scope of a standard publication; trainee-generated data are forgotten when the experimenter (e.g. student, post-doc) leaves the lab; results are omitted from science narratives due to publication bias where certain results are considered irrelevant for the publication. While authors are in the best position to curate their own data, they face a steep learning curve to ensure that appropriate referential tags, metadata, and ontologies are applied correctly to their observations, a task sometimes considered beyond the scope of their research and other numerous responsibilities. Getting researchers to adopt a new system of data reporting and curation requires a fundamental change in behavior among all members of the research community. To solve these challenges, we have created a novel scholarly communication platform that captures data from researchers and directly delivers them to information resources via Micropublication. This platform incentivizes authors to publish their unpublished observations along with associated metadata by providing a deliberately fast and lightweight but still peer-reviewed process that results in a citable publication. Our long-term goal is to develop a data ecosystem that improves reproducibility and accountability of publicly funded research and in turn accelerates both basic and translational discovery.

Additional Information

© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Received: 08 November 2017; Revision Received: 10 January 2018; Accepted: 18 January 2018; Published: 02 March 2018. The authors would like to thank members of the C. elegans research community and representatives from other model organisms databases such as TAIR (The Arabidopsis Information Resource, Phoenix Bioinformatics), Xenbase and ZFIN for their feedback on submission forms and workflow and to the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation for facilitating this community input. The authors would also like to thanks Juancarlos Chan for initial implementation of the submission forms. Funding: National Institute of Health (U01-LM012672 to P.W.S. and T.S.) for the Micropublication project. US National Human Genome Research Institute (U41-HG002223 to P.W.S.) for WormBase. Funding for open access charge: National Institute of Health U01-LM012672. Conflict of interest. None declared.

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 18, 2023