Specific BMDJ Open Access Policy

Biomedical Data Journal and the associated OpenScienceLink platform provide immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Authors of data made available on the platform remain the copyright holders and grant BMDJ and OpenScienceLink and any other third parties the right to use, reproduce and share the article according to the Creative Commons license agreement.

All data on the OpenScienceLink is made available under the following license: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. This means that anyone who wants to submit research data onto the platform has to understand and agree for the work to be made available under this license. Any user of the research data has to conform to the use requirements under this license. To upload the work the author must confirm to have permission to do so by clearing the copyrights. The data may not include any personal information under the data protection directive.

How do I submit a data paper?

The submission guidelines  for data papers for the Biomedical Data Journal and the OpenScienceLink platform can be found on the webpage of the Biomedical Data Journal: http://biomed-data.eu/content/submission-guidance

Given the abundance of scientific journals and repositories, there is no set standard on how to submit a scientific article, including a data paper. The researcher himself must verify the submission guidelines of the parties where he wishes to submit the article.

How should I cite my data?

As a good practice you must always cite the data you use. This can also be an obligation depending on the license that is attached to the scientific work (e.g. Creative Commons licenses require proper attribution to be given, whereby the correct citation method is often indicated within the work).

If you use data from a repository that has been released under an open license you should include a reference to the data paper describing the data, followed by a reference to the data in the repository itself.

It is essential that the citations are in the references section of the article and include the Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) or any other identifier the repository might use. Citation methods differ depending on your active field of research, however each citation must include basic elements that allow the dataset to be identified in the future, such as:

  • Title
  • Author
  • Data
  • Version
  • Persistent Identifier, such as the Digital Object Identifier.

For the citation style used by the Biomedical Data Journal you may refer to the respectibve paper template, available at http://biomed-data.eu/content/submission-guidance

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