IITA introduces flexible data citation in
CKAN
By Olatunbosun Obileye – Institutional
Data Manager (ORCID: 0000-0002-1200-0994)
One of the concerns in open access is
that open data that is reused under a CC-BY license may never receive credit
unlike most extracts taken from academic papers which can easily be cited in the
bibliography. There are online tools that can be used to generate citations
depending on the standard or format a writer prefers. Apart from the online
tools, several papers had been written in the past to guide writers on how to properly
cite references using any format. To protect and promote academic and research
activities online, plagiarism tools are available to ensure that proper credit
is given to authors.
In the area of data management, citation
is also a must for datasets. Data citation is the practice of providing a
reference to data in the same way that books or journals are referenced in
research publications.1 The practice will create a better
measurement of the validity of reused or generated data. However, data citation
is useless if there is no persistent digital identifier attached to the data.
Digital Object Identifiers or DOIs are a major tool that ensures that data
deposited in open access repositories are unique. They give your work the
credibility it deserves.
There are various formats for data
citation, but most repositories have a fixed citation format unlike that
obtainable in paper citations where a writer can adopt a format s/he prefers.
This limitation sometimes discourages data users from using the platforms? for
research or academic purposes. IITA had identified this gap and enhanced its
CKAN (http://data.iita.org), the institutional repository, to allow data users to choose their
preferred citation format. The options available now include APA, Chicago,
Harvard, IEEE, MLA, and Vancouver. This makes IITA’s CKAN stand out amid the data
consumed by GARDIAN, the CGIAR’s data ecosystem platform.
Data Management section under
Communication Unit has been working extensively to increase the visibility of
IITA’s research output. This new enhancement to CKAN was cited by DataKind[LK(1] in UK (global
nonprofit that harnesses the power of data science in the service of humanity) along
with the “exceptional high-quality dataset” in the repository. DataKind has
expressed its readiness to support IITA to dive into datasets in CKAN and gain
more insight for developing new digital agricultural products.
More and more scientists are starting to view
CKAN as the future of data archiving and institutional memory.
Flexible data citation
option in IITA's CKAN
[LK(1
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