James A Warren edited To Archive or Not to Archive .tex  about 10 years ago

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\subsection{To Archive or Not to Archive?}  The most critical question to be answered in setting policies for publications is “what data should be archived?” The answer is essential in providing clear expectations for authors, editors, and reviewers, as well as determining the size of the data repositories needed. Other disciplines have already embarked on this journey and have devised a variety of approaches that suit the data needs of their community for their stage of “digital maturity.” Two ends of the spectrum in addressing this question are presented here. The first assumes all data supporting a publication are worthy of archiving. This criterion is found most often in peer reviewed journals that have narrow technical scope and generally deal with very limited data types. For example, journals in crystallography and fluid thermodynamics have very stringent data archiving policies that prescribe formats and specific repositories for the data submitted. , submitted.\cite{actacryst,Koga_2013}  Other journals that cover broader technical scope, and therefore deal with more heterogeneous data, have implemented more subjective criteria for data archiving and a distributed repository philosophy. Earth sciences and evolutionary biology have typically taken this approach. It is likely that the approach adopted by MSE publications may also span a similar spectrum, depending on the scope of the publication.   The MRS-TMS “Big Data” survey provided insight into the community’s perspective on the relative value of access to various types of materials data, Figure 2.1 It’s interesting to note that as the complexity of the data and metadata increase (generally), the community’s perceived need to have access to this data decreases. This could be due to many factors including the difficulty in assuring the quality of such data as well as the lack of familiarity with tools to handle the complexity. However, with complexity comes a richness of information that if properly tapped could be extraordinarily valuable.