Publisher Interviews

During the period of project funding, the SageCite project was fortunate to benefit from the insight of the editors of two major journals in the biosciences. The editors of PLoS Computational Biology and Nature Genetics followed the progress of the project and shared their knowledge and views with us. The editors involved are both forward-looking visionaries, who have been active in discussing and promoting better integration of data with publications, and challenging the community to think about the future forms of publication. Philip E. Bourne is editor of PLoS Computational Biology and Myles Axton is editor of Nature Genetics. In January 2011, Phil Bourne was instrumental in the success of the Beyond The PDF event, which was hosted at San Diego. Myles Axton edited the issue of Nature Genetics in which the landmark paper on microattribution was published in April 2011.

In the following two interviews we have captured their thoughts on challenges for publishers and the wider community in providing better links between data and publications. The interviews explore a large range of issues concerning data, scholarly communications and publishers, including:

• challenges for publisher workflows in linking to data
• the emergence of data journals
• a challenge for the open access community to develop new ways of accessing content – and the potential to include data access into the mix
• responsibilities of data repositories
• the need for better recognition of data citation and re-use, and norms for citing data and measuring impact
• the interface between journal publishers and data repositories, the need for interoperability
• drivers for change in the community
• what do researchers and publishers need from data repositories?
• who should take on responsibility for persistence and management of cited data?
• when to assign identifiers?
• bi-directional and semantic links
• community standards and
• developments and initiatives in data citation over the last year