In December 2014, the Office for Science & Technology Policy at the White House announced the release of the Materials Genome Initiative’s Strategic Plan. One of the four key “areas of opportunity”of the plan is to make digital data accessible, which is expected to accelerate materials research and discovery.
We, at Materials Today, see data-sharing as one of the key challenges for the Materials Science community. We decided to lead the way and to make it simpler for authors to publicly share peer-reviewed, curated, formatted, indexed, citable raw research data. From 9th February 2015, 12 journals published by Elsevier have three new capabilities to store, share, discover and facilitate re-use of data: iPlots, Open Data on ScienceDirect and linking to Data in Brief.
These 12 journals cover a broad range of materials from polymers to ceramics, metallic alloys and nanomaterials, and encompass materials that find application in construction, tissue engineering, energy generation, electronics or aircrafts.
More details on how the Elsevier materials community is embracing data sharing can be found on our dedicated page on Materials Today.
This data-sharing initiative received strong support from the Editors of the selected journals, “I am very supportive of this move for Polymer” said Stephen Z. D. Cheng, Senior Editor, Polymer and Frank C. Sullivan Distinguished Research Professor at the The University of Akron, as well as from our society partners at Acta Materialia Inc., whose Chair, Dr. George (Rusty) T Gray III, indicated: “Acta strongly supports this move and wants to have our journals participate. Having served on a few NRC panels advocating data archives, I firmly believe this is critical”.
For more details, feel free to contact Dr Baptiste Gault (@bat__go).