John A. Kunze
Associate director, University of California Curation Center
California Digital Library
Catherine Mitchell
Director, Publishing Group
California Digital Library
Steven Abrams
Associate Director, University of California Curation Center
California Digital Library
Patricia Cruse
Director, University of California Curation Center
California Digital Library
There is a need to establish a new publishing paradigm to cope with the deluge of data artifacts produced by data-intensive science, many of which are vital to data re-use and verification of published scientific conclusions. Due to the limitations of traditional publishing, most of these artifacts are not usually disseminated, cited, or preserved. At the California Digital Library (CDL), one promising approach to the problem is to wrap these artifacts in the metaphor of a “data paper,” which is a somewhat unfamiliar bundle of scholarly output with a familiar facade: minimally, a set of links to archived artifacts and a cover sheet containing familiar elements such as title, authors, date, abstract, and persistent identifier, just enough to create basic citations, build “overlay journals,” and enable discovery of data by Internet search engines. Additional elements that permit deeper domain-specific discovery and re-use, such as variable names, methods, etc., are planned. A pilot implementation at CDL will bring a number of existing services to bear on the problem, including (a) the Merritt repository for safe, stable storage for datasets; (b) EZID for generating, managing, and resolving persistent identifiers; and (c) eScholarship for publishing data papers and overlay journals.