Schemas for Publications
When submitting a publication to a journal you are often asked to submit data, publish it in a repository, or otherwise make it available. The journals may ask that your data supports FAIR principles (that data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). You may be asked to submit supplementary data to a generalist or specialist repository, or you may choose to make the data available on request.
More FAIR data
Writing schemas to document your data using the Semantic Engine can help you meet these journal submission goals and requirements. The information documented in a schema (which may also be described as the data dictionary or the dataset metadata) helps your research data be more FAIR.
Documented information makes the data more findable in searches, accessible because people know what is in your datasets and can understand it, interoperable because people don’t need to guess what your data means, what your units are, and how you measured certain variables. All these contribute to improve the reusability of your dataset.
Deposit a schema
When you submit a dataset in any repository you can include the schemas (both the machine-readable .zip/JSON version and the human-readable and archival Readme.txt version) in your submission.
If you only want to make your data available by request you could publish just your schema, giving it a DOI, and referencing it in your publication. This way, anyone who wants to know if your data is useful before requesting it can look at the schema to see if it could contain information that they need.
The Semantic Engine makes it easy to document your schema because it is an easy to follow web interface with prompts and help information which assist you in writing your data schema. Follow our tutorial video to see how easy it is to create your own schema. You can use this documentation when submitting your data to a journal publication so that other people can understand and benefit from your data.
Written by Carly Huitema
