Data release papers

Not long ago I was posting about the option of publishing data release papers:

Data release papers are alternative publishing ways for researchers that have assembled DNA Barcode libraries for their work and the community at large. In the classical paper environment there would be no venue to present the data to the public let alone getting credit for it as the work was primarily a collection of data points which were generated to derive hypotheses from it. Data release paper usually come with only a limited number of analyses if any and are very descriptive. Nevertheless, this strategy has two main advantages. One being the fact that the data are much earlier released and available to the public through databases such as BOLD and Genbank (Sharing, sharing, sharing!). The other benefit for a researcher is the fact that he is credited for work that is not necessarily following older standards.  

Just yesterday an example for such a paper landed in my inbox. Miller et al. provide metadata for DNAbarcode (COI) data in GenBank and BOLD for a collection of caterpillar vouchers from ecological studies in Wanang, Papua New Guinea, sampled as part of long term research on the ecology and taxonomy of herbivorous insects there. 

The paper is short and briefly touches on the methods used to obtain samples and DNA Barcodes as well as the overall results. More importantly the data are available to the public on BOLD and in order to facilitate this they are using a new feature of BOLD that is to link datasets to DOI's. So if you follow this DOI link you will see this:

The entire dataset of the paper listed and available for review.

This new function works quite nicely. One only needs to use the dataset option (please note datasets are different from projects) on BOLD and as soon as you want to make a dataset public you will be asked if you want a DOI. We have done that for a few publications already. One example is a recent paper on Ophiuroids of the Southern Ocean with a DOI link to the data used in the paper.

h/t Scott Miller