[ASA] PASA datastore now open - publish your data!

[Daniel Price]

Dear ASA members,

 On behalf of the Editorial Board, I am delighted to announce the opening of the PASA datastore, thanks to the hard work of Amr Hassan and the GStar team:

http://data-portal.hpc.swin.edu.au/organization/pasa

This means you can now permanently archive datasets (of any type) associated with papers published in PASA with a unique doi. We are excited about this feature, a new frontier in astro publishing. One of the areas we are aiming for PASA to specialise in is the publication of supplement-style articles that describe code, catalogs or datasets that are outside the standard fare for “traditional” astronomy journals.

A more detailed FAQ is below, please don’t hesitate to ask me or any of the PASA Associate Editors if you have any queries or suggestions.

Send us your data!

Best wishes,

Daniel Price
Editor-in-chief, PASA

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Data curation FAQ
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Why data curation?

- We believe that data curation is essential for reproducible and open research.
- Enhances research productivity, no need to correspond with author directly
- Allows for data mining, comparison with previous results
- Means that authors can retrieve their own previous data (e.g. simulation initial conditions), which may be otherwise on different machine/lost/corrupted
- Increasingly a requirement of funding bodies

Why data curation in PASA?

- Publication often marks completion of data analysis, good time to organise and archive data
- Institutional solutions are piecemeal
- Astronomy has unique dependence on archival data, c.f. success of Hubble Space Telescope archives
- Astronomy has unique requirements (e.g. large datasets)
- No current integration of data storage with astro journals

How does it work?

- Your data is assigned a permanent doi, separate to the doi for your paper
- The published paper includes a link to the doi for the dataset in the published pdf
- The dataset also links back to the published paper

How long is data curated for?

- Our assignment of a permanent doi commits us to maintain the data for a minimum of 3 years during the initial stages of the datastore. However, our intention is to permanently curate and archive all data in the PASA datastore.

How much does it cost?

- Data curation is free to PASA authors

How do I use this feature?

- Simply indicate in your cover letter that there are datasets associated with the paper.
- Associate editor approves the dataset for permanent archiving (particularly important for large datasets)
- Paper is accepted for publication in PASA
- We will handle the rest!

What are the restrictions?

- We currently have a maximum dataset size of 1Tb, but with pending improvements to the datastore and a funding request to AAL we hope to increase this to 50Tb shortly.

Can the datastore have feature X?

- Yes, just ask, we are very interested in suggestions for improvement, particularly by early adopters

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