Data journals - peer-review publications about data

(adapted from the corresponding article on forschungsdaten.info)

What are data journals?

In addition to the traditional scientific journals for articles describing and interpreting research results, there are also data journals in which articles are published that only describe data but do not interpret it. Such articles describe, for example, data sets that are particularly significant or comprehensive or that are highly complex. The particular advantage of these data descriptions is that they undergo a peer review process similar to research articles in traditional journals and therefore meet a high quality standard.

The data described in the article are only linked to the article and are published separately, ideally in a data repository. Of course, it is also important to provide a link (ideally including DOI) to the data journal article in the repository in which the data was published.

In this way, a data publication in a data repository can include different articles: an article in a data journal (detailed description, without interpretation) and a research article in a classic scientific journal (focusing on the interpretation of the data).

Like traditional journals, data journals are either open access journals or closed access journals. Some data journals use open peer reviews for quality assurance in order to improve the transparency of the review process. One example of this from Earth System Sciences is the open access data journal Earth System Science Data.

Closely related to data journals are journals that publish descriptions of software, e.g. The Journal of Open Research Software or the Journal of Statistical Software.

Where can I look for data journals?

Data journals can be found, for example, via the list on forschungsdaten.org. A list sorted by research subject of the University of Würzburg also provides references to some data journals. A further list with approx. 130 data journals can be found here.