Predatory journal invitation

A few days ago I received an invitation to join an editorial board of a journal:

Dear Dr. Inna Kouper,
Wishes from The Scientific Pages!
We are glad to announce the successful launch of The Scientific Pages of Information Science. It is my great pleasure inviting you to join our editorial board.
...
You have been invited because of your contribution and recognized works in this field. Upon acceptance, we request you to send your recent photograph, CV, short biography and research interests. The details are requested in order to create your profile page in our journal.

Dataset: Roads and cities of 18th century France

An interesting dataset has been described in the Scientific Data journal and shared via the Harvard Dataverse repository - "Roads and cities of 18th century France".

The database presented here represents the road network at the french national level described in the historical map of Cassini in the 18th century. The digitization of this historical map is based on a collaborative methodology that we describe in detail. This dataset can be used for a variety of interdisciplinary studies, covering multiple spatial resolutions and ranging from history, geography, urban economics to network science.

The repository page showed 268 downloads on Sept 15, 2015, so hopefully, some examples of data re-use will follow this publication.

The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age

The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age - article from Current Biology (2014)

Highlights:

• The availability of data from 516 studies between 2 and 22 years old was studied


• The odds of a data set being reported as extant fell by 17% per year


• Broken e-mails and obsolete storage devices were the main obstacles to data sharing


• Policies mandating data archiving at publication are clearly needed

Submitted by Isabel Chadwick (Open University)

Source

Vines et al. The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age Current Biology Volume 24, Issue 1, 6 January 2014, Pages 94–97 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.11.014

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982213014000

Data Policy for Marine Data Sharing in Italy

The RITMARE Flagship Project, funded by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research, integrates national marine research of the whole Italian marine research community. To overcome barriers to data access, the RITMARE project issued a data policy - an agreement on how to share the data and products (see full document in Italian here http://figshare.com/articles/RITMARE_Data_Policy_document/1235546).
Below are the highlights of the RITMARE RDP:

1. The rules apply to both the RITMARE community and to the external users.


2. The generator (and the owner if other than the generator) must be named in all cases.


3. Anyone interested in publishing the data within the first two years from data creation, should verify if the data generator wants to participate as co-author.


4. A moratorium of 6, 12, or 18 months can be set for data generators to have primary publication rights.


5. Ancillary information (e.g., calibration files and instrument specifications) must be supplied with raw data regardless of the parameter values that data collection aimed at.


6. Licences apply to all background data and products.


7. At the end of the moratorium a licence automatically connects to the foreground data and products.

Source: Anna Basoni, Stefano Menegon and Alessandro Sarretta (2015), Sailing towards Open Marine Data: the RItMARE Data Policy. ERCIM NEWS, N 100, http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/images/stories/EN100/EN100-web.pdf