Cross-linking and workflows workshop report

The third and final workshop for the PREPARDE project was held at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory on the 30th April 2013. It was well attended with over 30 participants and a lot of excellent presentations and discussion on the workshop themes of how to manage workflows for data publication, and how to effectively link between datasets and the papers that cite them.

All the presentations given are now available on the workshop webpage at http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/preparde/wiki/CrosslinkingWorkshop

One theme that I noticed coming around several times was that of needing a central registry or broker to manage the flow of information between the data repositories and the data journals. As the moment, the beginnings of this exist in the form of the DataCite metadata store, where repositories deposit the DOI specific metadata, which can then be retrieved by the journal publisher. What is needed is a mechanism for the reverse to happen - i.e. a place for the journal to push the information that a dataset has been cited to, and where a repository can query/pull that citation information from.

Data citation as a mechanism for cross-linking also came up several times, with the general feeling of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" The consensus (at least in my breakout group) was that citation is a well-established, well-used and well-understood mechanism for linking between articles, so we can piggy-back on that to expand its use to linking datasets to articles as well.

We all took copious notes from our breakout and discussion session, which are in the process of being written up now. Once they're tidied up, they too will be added to the workshop webpage.

I'd like to thank again our wonderful presenters (some of whom even came from abroad!) and our participants for their active engagement and their insights at the workshop. We really appreciate it!

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