Building a Bridge Between Journal Articles and Research Data: The PKP-Dataverse Integration Project

A growing number of funding agencies and international scholarly organizations are requesting that research data be made more openly available to help validate and advance scientific research. Thus, this is an opportune moment for research data repositories to partner with journal editors and publishers in order to simplify and improve data curation and publishing practices. One practical example of this type of cooperation is currently being facilitated by a two year (2012-2014) one million dollar Sloan Foundation grant, integrating two well-established open source systems: the Public Knowledge Project’s (PKP) Open Journal Systems (OJS), developed by Stanford University and Simon Fraser University; and Harvard University’s Dataverse Network web application, developed by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS). To help make this interoperability possible, an OJS Dataverse plugin and Data Deposit API are being developed, which together will allow authors to submit their articles and datasets through an existing journal management interface, while the underlying data are seamlessly deposited into a research data repository, such as the Harvard Dataverse. This practice paper will provide an overview of the project, and a brief exploration of some of the specific challenges to and advantages of this integration. Received 13 January 2014 | Accepted 26 February 2014 Correspondence should be addressed to Eleni Castro, 1737 Cambridge Street, K318, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA. Email: [email protected] An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 9 International Digital Curation Conference. The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. The IJDC is published by the University of Edinburgh on behalf of the Digital Curation Centre. ISSN: 1746-8256. URL: http://www.ijdc.net/ Copyright rests with the authors. This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution (UK) Licence, version 2.0. For details please see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/ International Journal of Digital Curation 2014, Vol. 9, Iss. 1, 176–184 176 http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v9i1.311 DOI: 10.2218/ijdc.v9i1.311 doi:10.2218/ijdc.v9i1.311 Castro and Garnett | 177