I am revising a paper for a well known journal and I received an e-mail from a new sister journal that publishes data that would normally be buried in the supplemental section of the paper. They will publish any of the supplemental data as an independent manuscript that you can reference in your revision. In addition, you can submit this "mini-paper" along with your revision to the journal. Very odd. Has anyone done this? I kind of like the idea of bringing some data out on its own instead of leaving it to die in the supplemental sections. Here is the journal:
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/data-in-brief/
I publlished a transcriptome dataset that we generated as part of an effort to get data prior to grant submission. We acquired a good transcriptome with some limited funds we had but when our grant was not funded, we didn't want the data to die. So we wrote up a short manuscript for Data In Brief and got it published. We have another dataset that we will treat similarly. I liked the concept.
I publlished a transcriptome dataset that we generated as part of an effort to get data prior to grant submission. We acquired a good transcriptome with some limited funds we had but when our grant was not funded, we didn't want the data to die. So we wrote up a short manuscript for Data In Brief and got it published. We have another dataset that we will treat similarly. I liked the concept.
We ended up publishing the DIB instead of supplemental data in our case. Basically, we got two publications for one study and the data that would normally be buried in the supplemental is now front and center in DIB. That being said - I found the journal to be rather difficult to deal with and it was harder to get it off my desk than the higher impact paper it came from! Sill, I like the idea as well.
In what specific ways did you find that journal to be difficult do deal with?
I just found out about that journal today, and I am still trying to form an opinion about that concept. On the one hand, I think that:
- datasets should be published and that funders/grant evaluators/etc. should consider them when evaluating a CV
- journals should not request an author (on the grounds of "lack of space" or "specialist-only interest") to remove any portion of their analysis from the paper and into Supporting Information (and in this way effectively "bury" it from the record)
but on the other hand, getting "another publication" from the data seems to me somewhat "fishy", as it helps perpetuate the prevailing ethos of "paper-counting evaluations" and neglect (by evaluators) of datasets published/curated in outside repositories (like figshare, Zenodo or Dryad)
To be clear, the two publications are somewhat independent in that we focus on creating neurons from DPSC in the main publication, but in collaboration, made chondrocytes and adipocytes from immortalized vs non-immortalized DPSC (see below). In addition, the journal actual asked us to publish the supplemental as a DIB. The problem is that they don't really know what they want this journal to be about yet. They keep trying to get me to present my data with no interpretation - which I am opposed to doing. They also were difficult from the logisitics/administrative point of view. Either way, I tried it. I may never try it again, but I tried.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26599327
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26958627
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