10 Simple Rules for the Care and Feeding of Scienti fic Data by Alyssa Goodman, et. al.
From the introduction:
In the early 1600s, Galileo Galilei turned a telescope toward Jupiter. In his log book each night, he drew to-scale schematic diagrams of Jupiter and some oddly-moving points of light near it. Galileo labeled each drawing with the date. Eventually he used his observations to conclude that the Earth orbits the Sun, just as the four Galilean moons orbit Jupiter. History shows Galileo to be much more than an astronomical hero, though. His clear and careful record keeping and publication style not only let Galileo understand the Solar System, it continues to let anyone understand how Galileo did it. Galileo’s notes directly integrated his data (drawings of Jupiter and its moons), key metadata (timing of each observation, weather, telescope properties), and text (descriptions of methods, analysis, and conclusions). Critically, when Galileo included the information from those notes in Siderius Nuncius [1], this integration of text, data and metadata was preserved, as shown in Figure 1. Galileo’s work advanced the “Scientifi c Revolution,” and his approach to observation and analysis contributed signi ficantly to the shaping of today’s modern “Scientifi c Method” [2,3].
Goodman and co-authors from major research and educational institutions set forth ten (10) rules for the “care and feeding” of data:
- Love your data, and help others love it too.
- Share your data online, with a permanent identi er.
- Conduct science with a particular level of reuse in mind.
- Publish work ow as context.
- Link your data to your publications as often as possible.
- Publish your code (even the small bits).
- Say how you want to get credit.
- Foster and use data repositories.
- Reward colleagues who share their data properly.
- Be a booster for data science.
See the paper for the details but be aware the first seven (7) rules all mention documentation. 😉