The Amsterdam Manifesto on Data Citation Principles

The Amsterdam manifesto espouses the principles of citable open data. It is a short document, and it is worth re-stating its eight points here:

1. Data should be considered citable products of research.
2. Such data should be held in persistent public repositories.
3. If a publication is based on data not included with the article, those data should be cited in the publication.
4. A data citation in a publication should resemble a bibliographic citation and be located in the publication’s reference list.
5. Such a data citation should include a unique persistent identifier (a DataCite DOI recommended, or other persistent identifiers already in use within the community).
6. The identifier should resolve to a page that either provides direct access to the data or information concerning its accessibility. Ideally, that landing page should be machine-actionable to promote interoperability of the data.
7. If the data are available in different versions, the identifier should provide a method to access the previous or related versions.
8. Data citation should facilitate attribution of credit to all contributors.

The manifesto itself is dated  20 March 2013, but the principles above go back far earlier, and most of the articles above have been implemented in this blog for a little while now. But its best illustrated with an example[1]. Here I have used the excellent wordpress extension Kcite to adhere to points 1-5 and 8 above. Point 6 is the most interesting perhaps, and it is illustrated below. If you click on the graphic, it will load the log file associated with the calculation described in the previous post to convert the data to a rotatable 3D model, using Jmol.

This actually represents a departure from how I normally invoke data on this blog. I have hitherto done it by uploading the data to the WordPress uploads directory (it is thus in effect a local copy of the data). Here in this post I have not done that; it’s coming directly from the citable data repository, using e.g.

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