BEST PRACTICES FOR AUTHORS, DATA REPOSITORIES, EDITORS, AND PUBLISHERS TO ENABLE GEOINFORMATICS USING THE SCHOLARLY LITERATURE AND TO EMPOWER PUBLISHED DATA

A number of best practices and resources are emerging to enable geoinformatics on all parts of the scholarly literature, including in finding and reusing data connected to publications, although further steps are needed. These steps are also critical for improving integrity across scholarly publishing and enabling research about the progress and practice of science. Enabling these requires awareness and cooperation of publishers, editors, authors, and data repositories and further alignment in standards and processes. One key set of standards are common identifiers that can robustly connect information across the literature. The use of DOI’s is now common and illustrates the power of these for creating robust links. ORCID has emerged as the standard author identifier. CREDIT is emerging as a minimum standard for author contributions but is not yet regularly included let alone as metadata, and is connected to larger authorship standards (http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/20/140228). A standard Institutional identifier is being developed, and the Crossref funder identifier is now widely used. IGSN’s provide sample identifiers but are not yet widely used. Identifiers for repositories are needed and eventually instruments. Publishers need to implement these in standard ways. Secondly, publishers can now provide open citations through Crossref; this enables a wide variety knowledge and research about scholarly publishing. Finally, best practices are emerging around linking data and software with publications (see http://copdess.org for updates) and efforts are underway to strengthen and standardize these and develop tools to make data and data and software findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Publishers need to collect appropriate metadata at the time of submission and include data and software citations in references and emphasize domain repositories when these are available. Researchers, can help by collecting data in ways that preserves and includes necessary metadata. Repositories can standardize exposing data and ensuring that metadata and identifiers are provided and helping facilitate the peer review process.