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Hi Hardy/Federica,
One needs to accommodate disciplinary differences here. In some cases, supplementary materials sections within journals (the additional electronic files) would provide all sufficient information to reproduce experiments. These supplementary materials sections would often consist not only of text and sample images as a single pdf, but frequently they do contain other types of data, for example spreadsheets, movies etc.
Here at Cambridge we allow authors to use the supplementary materials sections of the journal to provide information about supporting data. Frequently however, they will use a combination of the two – if their data is bigger than simple spreadsheets (or the journal does not allow them to upload files other than pdf/word documents), they upload data files to our repository, and then link to them from the supplementary materials document.
In terms of long-term availability, since the main focus of EPSRC policy is research data underpinning publications, the assumption is that publications will be available long-term from the journal’s website. So if we trust publishers that they would make publications available long-term (and do not start backing up publishers’ websites), same should apply to other documentation supporting the publication available from the publisher’s website.
Best wishes,
Marta
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Marta Teperek, PhD
Research Data Facilitator
University Library/ Research Operations Office
University of Cambridge
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
tel. 01223 333138
From: Research Data Management discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Schwamm, Hardy
Sent: 11 August 2015 12:36
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: EPSRC data policy: articles' ESI as research Data?
Hi Federica
We have encountered similar scenarios where "data" is linked to an article as supplementary material and we are not sure if that is compliant with funder requirements.
The main issues we see are:
· No permanent identifiers
· Doubts about longevity of supplementary data
The question if this data actually represents the "data" or not is an interesting additional one.
Hardy
-----Original Message-----
From: Research Data Management discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Federica Fina
Sent: 11 August 2015 10:39
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: EPSRC data policy: articles' ESI as research Data?
Dear All
I am looking for some advice about the EPSRC Research Data Policy, in particular your opinion regarding article’s ESI (electronic supplementary information) considered as research data.
As RDM team we have been asking our researches/academics to deposit raw research data in our IR in order to comply with EPSRC. The answer we are often given is that the ESI is already openly available with the article on the journal's website and that should be enough. However, in most of the cases the ESI is a .pdf or .docx document with additional images/graphs/charts which we believe is not actual data but only a representation of it (same as the article) and as such it cannot be re-used to do further research and does not allow the validation of the research findings.
Have you ever received similar comments? Would you consider ESI enough to comply with EPSRC?
I would really appreciate your advice.
Thank you!
Best wishes,
Federica
Dr Federica Fina
Data Scientist
University of St Andrews Library
North Street, St Andrews, KY16 9TR
Tel: +44 (0)1334 462343