Presentation by David Shotton on Force11 and the Amsterdam Manifesto on data citation and then introducing the final panel session at the Now and Future of Data Publishing Symposium, 22 May 2013, Oxford, UK
2. Force11 - background
Force11 (The Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship;
http://www.force11.org/) is a virtual community working to transform scholarly
communications toward improved knowledge creation and sharing
It arose as a consequence of a workshop on The Future of Research
Communications held at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, in the August 2011
That meeting led to the publication of a white paper entitled
Improving Future Research Communication and e-Scholarship:
http://www.force11.org/sites/default/files/book_attachments/Force11Manifest
o20120219.pdf
Currently, we have 363 active members, and we invite you to join
In March 2013, Force11 organized a great conference in Amsterdam
Beyond the PDF 2
http://www.force11.org/beyondthepdf2
The Amsterdam Manifesto on Data Citation
resulted from that conference
3. The Force11 Amsterdam Manifesto on Data Citation
Initiated by Mercè Crosas, Director of Data Science at
the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at
Harvard University
The result of a lunch-time brainstorming session during
the Beyond the PDF 2 Conference
Available at
http://www.force11.org/AmsterdamManifesto
The Amsterdam Manifesto reads:
We wish to promote best practices in data citation to facilitate access to data
sets and to enable attribution and reward for those who publish data.
Through formal data citation, the contributions to science by those that
share their data will be recognized and potentially rewarded.
To that end, we propose that:
4. The Force11 Amsterdam Manifesto on Data Citation
1. Data should be considered citable products of research
2. Such data should be held in persistent public repositories
3. If a publication is based on data not included with the article, those data
should be cited in the publication
4. A data citation in a publication should resemble a bibliographic citation
and be located in the publication’s reference list
5. Such a data citation should include a unique persistent identifier
(a DataCite DOI recommended, or other persistent identifiers already in
use within the community)
6. The identifier should resolve to a page that either provides direct access to
the data or information concerning its accessibility. Ideally, that landing
page should be machine-actionable to promote interoperability of the data
7. If the data are available in different versions, the identifier should provide a
method to access the previous or related versions
8. Data citation should facilitate attribution of credit to all contributors
5. The Force11 Amsterdam Manifesto on Data Citation
We wanted to keep the manifesto statements short, without so many
qualifiers and explanations as to make it heavy and unreadable
Rather, we attempted to state its eight distinct principles as briefly and clearly
as possible
The Amsterdam Manifesto was winner of the conference 1K Challenge
“What would you do with $1K that would significantly advance scholarly
communication that does not involve building a new software tool?”
We asked for funds to set up and manage a web site on which to post
the Amsterdam Manifesto for Data Citation
Thanks the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the 1K Challenge Sponsor
We invite all of you to endorse the Amsterdam Manifesto, which you can do
online at
http://www.force11.org/node/4370
6. The panel members and their topics
Eefke Smit (Director, Standards & Technology, STM Publishers Association)
Should journals scrap 'supplementary material'?
Bill Michener (Principle Investigator, DataONE; Dryad board member)
Can institutional data repositories and subject-
specific data repositories co-exist?
Brian Hole (Publisher, Ubiquity Press)
Is the 'data journal' a convenient fiction?
Susan Reilly (Project Officer, LIBER – Assoc. European Research Libraries)
Why should libraries curate data?
Mark Thorley (NERC, Chair RCUK Research Outputs Network)
Can we afford universal data publication?
Sarah Callaghan (Senior Research Scientist, British Atmospheric Data Centre)
Data and society – how can we ensure future
political decisions are evidence-led?