Data journals focus on the publication of data papers — a specialized publication type describing datasets, their collection and reuse potential that is peer-reviewed, citable and indexed.
With the development of Open Science and the gradual opening up of data, peer review of published data is beginning to develop. Thus, some publishers are experimenting with “Data papers” (data article, data note, dataset article, data original article, database article, etc.) that describe a specific dataset. For example F1000Research, an open access life science journal published by Taylor & Francis, publishes “Data papers” as a special kind of scientific article. A definition of the form of such article type can be found (for BMC Springer Nature) in The anatomy of a Data Note.
For an overview there is a list of 135 different data journals, this document is describing a dataset that aggregates information about 135 data journals – Kindling, Maxi, & Strecker, Dorothea. (2022). List of data journals.
Selected examples of major publishers and their data journals:
- Springer Nature – Scientific data (Life science); BMC Research Notes (Biology, Medicine)
- Elsevier – Data in brief (All fields); Chemical Data Collections;
- Wiley/Blackwell – Geoscience Data Journal (Geoscience)
- American Chemical Society – Journal of Chemical and Engineering Data (Chemical engineering)
- Oxford academics – GigaScience (Big data)
- Taylor & Francis Group – F1000Research (Life science)
