National Academies Press: OpenBook
« Previous: Breakout Session on Institutional, Financial, Legal, and Socio-cultural Issues
Suggested Citation:"Breakout Session on Institutional Roles and Perspectives." National Research Council. 2012. For Attribution: Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards: Summary of an International Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13564.
×

Breakout Session on Institutional Roles and Perspectives

Moderator: Bonnie Carroll
Rapporteur: Jillian Wallis

Several participants began by focusing on the stakeholders and low-level details about the interaction between the stakeholders and the data citations. Others then raised several questions: Who is cited: the data center hosting the data, the data producer, or anyone who has added value to the data? This is really a question of whether the citation is for assigning credit or finding data. It should be noted that there are many stakeholders who add value to the data and it may not be feasible to acknowledge everyone. Who is responsible for generating a citation: the data center hosting the data, some collaboration between the producer and archivist, or the data user consulting with the data producer to create a citation? The credit aspects of citation thus may conflict with the location and discoverability aspects, which have very different sets of requirements.

A number of the participants identified issues that pulled apart the roles of data citation stakeholders. Who should be the citation creator: the data creator responsible for providing a citable thing, or the data user responsible for citing that thing? Who is responsible for collecting metrics? This led to plotting out the events that happen during the life of a data citation and assigning responsible parties. Figure S-1 presents one understanding of how data citations will come to be. Rather than being a representation of the life-cycle of an individual data citation, it instead depicts the life cycle of how data citation practices in general will be created. In this case, life-cycle is perhaps a misnomer, and instead what is captured in the figure is a timeline for organizing all of the interested parties.

It is important to further define the data citation lifecycle and the roles and responsibilities of institutions and people who act at each stage, in order to determine who is missing from this discussion and how we can get them involved.

ch50.jpg

FIGURE S-1 Data citation lifecycle.

Suggested Citation:"Breakout Session on Institutional Roles and Perspectives." National Research Council. 2012. For Attribution: Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards: Summary of an International Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13564.
×

Prior to the actual creation and adoption of data citations, several participants suggested, one option is to develop an understanding of the social ramifications of the data citation and the frameworks with which data citations would need to interact. This understanding could come from academic research on data practices. At the top level, research funders, universities, and journal publishers could think about developing a data citation policy that supports their respective needs and creates incentives to encourage data citation.

Using such a base of understanding and policy, many parties may wish to work in parallel to make data citation a reality. Research communities can define the data citation elements that are meaningful to them. Journal publishers and standards bodies can define general data citation layouts that are both machine and human-readable. In order for a data citation to be created: (i) the data need to have been generated by someone, and (ii) the data need to be available with enough information attached in order to create the data citation. The data generator or the data center hosting the data will then make the actual citation content available. The data users are responsible for actually using the data citation in their publications. The derivative data cycle here refers to the practice of creating derivative datasets from other datasets. A new form of data citation could be developed in order to take this practice into account, and can involve some combination of the original data generators or hosts and the data users in a new data citation or a data citation that expands into multiple data citations.

Once the various standards are in play, several participants remarked that training and education would be useful about how and when data citations can be used. The university libraries are perhaps well positioned to reach out to the academic communities they support. Finally, commercial parties can aggregate data citations, much like citations are aggregated to characterize scholarly communication in the literature.

Suggested Citation:"Breakout Session on Institutional Roles and Perspectives." National Research Council. 2012. For Attribution: Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards: Summary of an International Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13564.
×
Page 209
Suggested Citation:"Breakout Session on Institutional Roles and Perspectives." National Research Council. 2012. For Attribution: Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards: Summary of an International Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13564.
×
Page 210
Next: Appendix A: Agenda »
For Attribution: Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards: Summary of an International Workshop Get This Book
×
Buy Paperback | $48.00 Buy Ebook | $38.99
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF

The growth of electronic publishing of literature has created new challenges, such as the need for mechanisms for citing online references in ways that can assure discoverability and retrieval for many years into the future. The growth in online datasets presents related, yet more complex challenges. It depends upon the ability to reliably identify, locate, access, interpret, and verify the version, integrity, and provenance of digital datasets. Data citation standards and good practices can form the basis for increased incentives, recognition, and rewards for scientific data activities that in many cases are currently lacking in many fields of research. The rapidly-expanding universe of online digital data holds the promise of allowing peer-examination and review of conclusions or analysis based on experimental or observational data, the integration of data into new forms of scholarly publishing, and the ability for subsequent users to make new and unforeseen uses and analyses of the same data-either in isolation, or in combination with, other datasets.

The problem of citing online data is complicated by the lack of established practices for referring to portions or subsets of data. There are a number of initiatives in different organizations, countries, and disciplines already underway. An important set of technical and policy approaches have already been launched by the U.S. National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and other standards bodies regarding persistent identifiers and online linking.

The workshop summarized in For Attribution -- Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards: Summary of an International Workshop was organized by a steering committee under the National Research Council's (NRC's) Board on Research Data and Information, in collaboration with an international CODATA-ICSTI Task Group on Data Citation Standards and Practices. The purpose of the symposium was to examine a number of key issues related to data identification, attribution, citation, and linking to help coordinate activities in this area internationally, and to promote common practices and standards in the scientific community.

  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    Switch between the Original Pages, where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  9. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!