Annals of Forest Science promotes Open Science by publishing data papers
Open Science is a combination of practices enhancing collaborative work and dissemination of all productions related to research processes. These practices result in a free availability of research data, analytical pipelines, lab notes and other research products, under terms that enable reuse, redistribution and reproduction of the research and its underlying data and methods (https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/foster-taxonomy/open-science-definition).
Annals of Forest Science strongly supports the open-data movement and in particular the sharing of datasets in public repositories with explicit metadata providing the information about content and interpretation of the data sets. Publicly available datasets are citable, listed as productions, spread the visibility of the research, and finally contribute to increase the confidence in the published science.
Our journal offers the possibility to publish data papers that are peer reviewed articles describing datasets for future reuse. Data papers consist in a clear and exhaustive description of the dataset, its content, its potential use, and all the metadata required to access the dataset. Submitting a data paper means that the datasets are already hosted in a public repository and tagged with a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). If restrictions apply to the availability of the datasets, embargo and limited access are possible for some repositories. Our journal puts a particular emphasis on the respect of the FAIR guiding principles: data must be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable but not necessarily openly available. Please contact us at annforsci@inra.fr and see the journal’s website and our blog for more information.
Publishing data papers offers several advantages:
- Increased visibility: Data papers are more easily findable by search engines than datasets, and both are interoperable and citable items;
- Increased usability and credibility of the data resources: The data papers are peer-reviewed and the quality of the metadata provided facilitates the reuse of the datasets (e.g. for meta-analyses);
- More effective tracking of the usage and citations of the data published;
- Authors are given credit for their publication through indexing and citation of the published paper: Data providers, who do not always publish research articles, are rewarded for their work.
Publishing data papers offers benefits for authors in terms of recognition and career building. Therefore, we encourage PhD students and young researchers to use the publication of data papers as a training for producing more complex research papers.
In addition, Annals of Forest Science welcomes the submission of manuscripts that are already available on a pre-print server such as BioRxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org/). Authors who wish to submit a data paper to our Journal may consider submitting their manuscript as a preprint to make it visible during the peer-review process.
Contact us for more information at annforsci@inra.fr
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