All That Matters

Photo by UncaughtException via flickr.

This week Science magazine has an interesting special issue on scientific data, covering a variety of topics from data backup and data visualization to open data. It seems these contributions are free to access for registered user of their web site, and it certainly is worthwhile to have a look.

The editorial in particular lays out Science’s policy on open data. Sharing scientific results is of course a motivation for publishing a paper in the first place. And to allow for independent verification of scientific results, the data contained in a publication has to be available and shared with other scientists. This sharing has to be done in a permanent way that guarantees access to archives also in future.

Is the data analysis traceable?

However, there is another point that hasn’t come across that strong from this special issue, but one that I also consider to be very important. And that is that data processing itself needs to be tracked, by which I mean the steps from the raw scientific data as measured all the way to the plots in a scientific paper need to be traceable. […]