DANS and Brill launched on October 20th, 2015 a totally new online magazine for research data: Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Research Data Journal (RDJ) is a digital open access journal, which is designed to comprehensively document and publish deposited data sets and to facilitate their online exploration. In this way it wants to contribute to transparency of research, accelerate dissemination and foster reuse. The journal concentrates on the social sciences and the humanities, covering history, archaeology, language and literature in particular. The publication languages are English and Dutch.
The RDJ contains data papers: scholarly publications of medium length (with a maximum of 2500 words) containing a non-technical description of a data set and putting the data in a research context. A data paper gets a persistent identifier and provides publication credits to the author, who is usually (but not necessarily) also the data depositor.
Before publication a data paper is assessed by editorial advisers, who are part of the editorial board. Hereafter, the community of readers may post (short) comments on the paper. RDJ will contain enhanced publications, a concept that usually refers to a research article linked to the underlying data, optionally enhanced with interactive facilities and multimedia which make the reading of text and validation of conclusions more convenient.
The RDJ is the start of a new development, blurring the boundaries between traditional scholarly papers and datasets.
Contact: datajournal@dans.knaw.nl