Independent library publishers have lagged behind other nonprofit and commercial publishers in implementing data sharing policies and platforms for our journals. At the California Digital Library, we have been exploring various ways to support true data sharing for our journal publishing program, both on our current journal manuscript workflow platform (a customized version of OJS) and as a requirement for future systems. In addition to improving our technical services, we have also focused on educating our journal editors on best practices around data sharing. This spring, in collaboration with the data curation group (UC3) at the CDL, we presented a webinar for our journal editors on open data policies and practices and gauged their interest in setting up a data sharing component of their submission and publishing workflows. I will provide an overview of our talking points from the webinar, including definitions and types of data across disciplines, what exactly open data means and why it is crucial in a climate of research budget cuts, and the key characteristics of several major publisher policies, from PLOS to university presses. I will also share what we learned from our journal editors regarding their knowledge about open data and their interest in working with it; and, based on this information, the data publishing options we have decided to pursue for our journal program.
