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This is the test page for the Editor's Roundtable - an Initiative for Best Practices for Data Publication

What is the Editor's Roundtable?

The Editor's Roundtable is a community-based initiative, conceived by editors, publishers, and operators of data facilities at a series of meetings held in conjunction with major scientific conferences that IEDA facilitated. It is an effort to facilitate and foster communication and knowledge exchange among editors and publishers of Earth Science journals and Earth Science data facilities with the goal to develop, implement, and promote guidelines and best practices for scholarly publishing with particular emphasis on the publication of data in support of open access policies.

The Editors Roundtable builds on a successful initiative started in 2007 by EarthChem, which since 2010 is part of the IEDA data facility, to develop and promote best practices for the reporting of geochemical data in scholarly articles and data systems, and that resulted in a Policy Recommendation ‘Requirements for the Publication of Geochemical Data’ (Goldstein et al. 2014, doi:10.1594/IEDA/100426), which was endorsed by all major scientific journals that publish geochemical data and has guided policies for the disclosure and documentation of geochemical data.

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The “best practices” will include standards for:

1. Archiving and curating data sets;
2. Setting references and identifiers;
3. Linking datasets to publications;
4. Integrating with emerging data citation practices and bibliometrics for data;
5. Complying with interoperability standards.

1. Data Accessibility and Format

Access to the complete data, upon which new scientific discovery and knowledge is based, is a fundamental requirement for the reproducibility of scientific results. All NEW geochemical data used in a publication must be made available for future use by (1) submission to an accessible, persistent source such as a public database or data archive (for example, personal web sites are not persistent data archives), if it exists for the specific data type, or by (2) listing the data explicitly in a data table associated with the publication. The data must in any case be available in downloadable format. For chemical abundance data of samples, elemental or oxide abundance data must be given unless a compelling reason can be provided; elemental abundance ratios are acceptable only if the compositional data do not exist. Isotope ratios are, of course, acceptable.

Data should be reported in tabular format. Data must always be available as a downloadable file in a format that can be easily converted into spreadsheet format (for example, .csv, .txt). The file should include units for the listed measured values. This means that if a publication contains a data table in the main text or a pdf or image version of the data table as an electronic supplement, the data in the table(s) must also be available in a downloadable form that can be easily converted to spreadsheet format.

1. Data Quality Information

Existing data facilities

1. EarthChem
2. GEOROC
3. Pangea
4. Data cite
5. EarthCube: Council of Data Facilities
6. NAVDAT
7. GANSEKI
8. USGS publication warehouse
9. NASA
10. NOAA
11. Smithsonian
12. NERC data centers includes the following:

Centre for Environmental Data Archival

National Geoscience Data Centre

Resources for data publication

1. ESIP Data Citation Guidelines
2. Force 11 Data Citation Principles
3. GENSEKI data policy
4. NERC data policy
5. USGS