Data journals should focus more on data reuse

Academic data journals are lacking in their ability to make data effectively discovered and reused by others, an article has said.

The Data Journals: A Survey article, published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, has found that many editors of data journals do not have a unified strategy for promoting data reuse. Many journals emphasise the availability of data, often neglecting the extent of its coverage, quality and reuse, the report found.

Data journals often use vague citation practices and have a “rather general lack of data-sharing culture,” the study found.  It looked at more than 100 existing data journals and examined their approaches to promoting data distribution and reuse.