| Making data - technically - citable has been a theme for a number of years. Meanwhile, these efforts have culminated in DataCite. Although technical and formal means to cite data thus exist, a wave of data publishing has not happened. This is frequently being attributed to a restrictive “culture” or tradition in science: What to cite, not just how to cite. Regarding reliability, DataCite and others provide stability and precision of reference to (specific parts of) datasets – but not certification of its content. The journal Earth System Science Data (ESSD) aspires to provide datasets with this missing element. It does not replace data repositories, since data will not be stored or made accessible by the publisher. Rather, the editors require the dataset to reside in a reliable repository and to have a stable way of linking to it.
Today, quality-related information is frequently not present in data or metadata, rendering it quite useless. ESSD requires it and adds reliability through the scrutiny of peers. Both are needed so that future users of these data can build on them, sceptically as always, but confidently. The (review-)criteria and methods of ESSD discussed here will not be directly applicable to all types of data - for practical as well as intellectual reasons. However, it is the vision of founders and editors that the added value it provides to datasets will help foster substantial data publishing, re-use and mandatory citation of data in a subset of this journal’s disciplinary domain. |