Hindawi partner with AGU to improve their policies on data sharing.
Openness is a key driver behind everything we are striving to achieve here at Hindawi, and as such we are excited to announce that we are now formal signatories of the ‘Commitment to Enabling FAIR Data in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences’.
Making data accessible and discoverable in Earth, space and environmental sciences is of great importance, as much of these sciences’ output represents recordings of events that can never be repeated. Hence this project, driven by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), aims to bring together repositories, publishers, societies and institutions to work towards the goal of ensuring that all research outputs alongside scholarly articles (such as data, software and samples) from across the Earth, space and environmental sciences are open, FAIR, and curated in repositories wherever possible.
In order for data to be aligned with the FAIR principles it should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. By becoming a signatory, Hindawi have committed to striving to implement these principles across all of our journals in relevant fields, and working with the relevant communities to raise the standards of open data. For us, that has involved improving our research data guidelines for authors to include clear information on how best to abide by these principles. To enable this we provide assistance to authors with finding FAIR aligned repositories for all core research outputs, as well as guidelines on how to correctly cite data and software – these elements help to ensure that data associated with articles we publish can be discovered and reused wherever possible.
In order to better implement these principles in the future, and become further compliant with this commitment, we have worked to improve our processes around data availability to ensure that data and research outputs supporting publications in our earth, space, and environmental sciences journals are openly accessible at the time of publication (barring legitimate exceptions). We will be implementing these new processes in the near future, to coincide with the transition of these journals to our new peer review system.
We will continue to develop our data policies and partnerships with the AGU and other relevant organisations, and hope that by championing these commitments and initiatives Hindawi will be able to better support the Earth, space and environmental sciences, as well as the wider scientific community, in making research outputs more open and discoverable.
This blog post is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). The illustration is by Hindawi and is also CC-BY.