Pensoft Data Publishing Policies and Guidelines for Biodiversity Data

The current document describes the data publishing policies of Pensoft Publishers, with an emphasis on biodiversity and biodiversity-related ecological data. Publishing the data associated with research articles is strongly encouraged in all Pensoft’s journals.

Data publishing in this digital age is the act of making data available on the Internet, so that they can be downloaded, analysed, re-used and cited by people and organisations other than the creators of the data. This can be achieved in various ways. In the broadest sense, any upload of a dataset onto a freely accessible website could be regarded as “data publishing”. There are, however, several issues to be considered during the process of data publication, including:

• Data hosting, long-term preservation and archiving
• Documentation and metadata
• Citation and credit to the data authors
• Licenses for publishing and re-use
• Data interoperability standards
• Format of published data
• Software used for creation and retrieval
• Dissemination of published data

This Data Publishing Policies document describes some general concepts, including a definition for datasets, incentives to publish data, and methods and licenses for data publishing. Further, it defines and compares the two main routes for data publishing, namely as supplementary information files to research articles, which may be made 3 available directly by the publisher, or published in a specialized data repository with a link to the research article or a Data Paper,  i.e. a specific, stand-alone publication describing a particular dataset or a collection of datasets.

More detailed instructions on how to prepare data for publication are listed below under the Guidelines for Authors. The Guidelines for Reviewers section describes the main criteria for evaluation of data during the peer-review and editorial process. Special attention is given to existing standards, protocols and tools to facilitate data publishing, such as the GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) and the Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A).

A separate section describes some of the leading data hosting/indexing infrastructures and repositories for biodiversity and ecological data.