News: Dataverse Plugin Release

The Public Knowledge Project is excited to announce the first public release of the Dataverse Network plugin for Open Journal Systems 2.3+. This plugin has been developed by PKP in collaboration with Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, with support from the Sloan Foundation, and an earlier version was demonstrated at the 2013 PKP conference in Mexico City. It represents the continued improvement of both platforms — OJS’ SWORD library, and Dataverse’s API.

Although OJS has always allowed for the publication of supplementary files alongside articles, it previously had no special provision for the review, publication, or presentation of common research data formats. In keeping with OJS’ focus on a robust scholarly workflow, Dataverse integration allows for consistent editorial policies to be applied to the submission and exposure of supplemental data; for example, data may or may not be subject to peer review, and in some cases it may be desirable to publish and provide an identifier to a dataset even when its corresponding article is rejected. It also allows embargoes of content as appropriate. This integration allows journals to facilitate data sharing and archiving, allowing authors to be able to deposit their research data at the same time as their article. This streamlines the data submission process and provides an indexed, permanent identifier for published data.

Samuel Moore, Managing Editor of Ubiquity Press Metajournals, adds: The Ubiquity Press Metajournals will benefit hugely from the OJS-Dataverse plugin. We will be installing the plugin on all of our Metajournal submission systems, allowing our authors to seamlessly upload their datasets directly to each journal’s Dataverse. This is a positive step in ensuring that research data is made openly available for replication and reuse.

The plugin can be downloaded from https://github.com/jwhitney/dataverse, where you will find install directions and workflow documentation for OJS 2.3+. The plugin is still under development; we have scoped improvements to metadata customization and general UI enhancements before it will be included with a later version of OJS by default. Any questions at this stage should be directed to Alex at garnett@sfu.ca. We hope you like it!
Reposted with permission from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) site: http://pkp.sfu.ca/dataverse-network-plugin-release/#more-1452716