N8 CIR Webinar: Demystifying Data Journals

Last week, Tuesday 10 March, the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR) held an online workshop entitled ‘Demystifying Data Journals’. This event was organised by colleagues from Lancaster University, the University of Sheffield, the N8 CIR, and Manchester’s Office for Open Research.

The aim of the event was to raise awareness of data journals – what they are and how they can contribute to research communication and impact, as well as advice from a panel of journal editors from N8 universities on best practice for submitting and developing a research data journal publication.

For those new to this area of scholarly communication, data journals are a format of publication that publish datasets or ‘data papers’ rather than conventional research articles. They offer a route to increase the visibility of research data outputs whilst also rewarding creators with a peer-reviewed publication, credit, and increased opportunity for citation (Walters, 2020).

The event was both well-attended and well-received by participants from across the N8, UK, Europe, and internationally as far as the USA and Australia. This reflects the growing level of interest in data journals by researchers looking for new ways to communicate their research that go beyond traditional formats that focus on results. It also illustrates increased interest on the part of research data professionals (data stewards, librarians, data managers, data scientists and dRTPs) seeking new approaches that promote data sharing and that credit their contributions to delivering Open Research outputs.

Attendees heard from:

• Prof. Vanessa Higgins, University of Manchester. Editorial Board Member for the Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences;
• Judith Winters, University of York. Editor of Internet Archaeology;
• Dr Derek Gatherer, Lancaster University. Editorial Board, Scientific Data and
• Dr Laura Sbaffi, University of Sheffield. Section Editor for PLOS Digital Health and Associate Editor for JASIST (Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology).

In addition to the informative talks, topics of discussion between the attendees and speakers included strategies to communicate the benefits of data journal publications to researchers; the balance between openness and ethically-justified restrictions for hard-to-share qualitative data; whether a future UKRI Open Access policy should include data papers as in scope; and the timely nature of the event with the 10^th anniversary of the publication of the FAIR data principles in Scientific Data.

The recordings and slides from the event are now available on the N8 CIR website here.

Further information

• Check out the What is a data journal? guide in the Office for Open Research Knowledge Base.
• Attend the next online edition of the Research Data Conversations series or Introduction to FAIR data principles workshop.
• Catch up on the N8 CIR Working with and Managing Sensitive Research Data workshop (October 2025).
• Visit the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research website.

Dr. Tristan Martin, Open Research Librarian: Research Data Stewardship