Add attribute citation_id

castelao commented 5 years ago

THIS IS OUTDATED. I'm editing this proposal to reflect the discussions so far, but I'll save a copy of this original proposal.

Title: DOI attribute

Moderator: to be defined

Requirement Summary: Optional DOI attribute in section Description of file contents (2.6.2).

Technical Proposal Summary: Add a new optional attribute to designate the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the data contained in the CF data object.

Benefits: DOIs allow easy automation for tracking the scientific impact of the data on the exact same fashion that scientific publications are tracked with DOIs. Anyone involved in the resulted data can be recognized, including funding agencies.

Status Quo: An increasing number of scientific journals start to require a DOI for the dataset used in the publication. Many groups already include DOI as an attribute in its NetCDF-CF datasets but without a standard, thus hard to automate.

Detailed Proposal: The only modification required would be in section 2.6.2: Description of file contents. In the bottom, after item comment, it would be added:

doi: Digital object identifier (DOI) of the dataset. For simplicity, the proxy part
       of the DOI is dropped, so it is composed by the suffix plus the prefix only,
       e.g. “10.21238/S8SPRAY1618”.

As mentioned in the 2.6.2 section, all attributes are optional, and the doi would follow the same rule.

This propose was developed with the help of @kenkehoe

Reasoning:

DOI is a de facto standard to track academic publications, thus providing the foundation for some measurement of scientific impact. There is a clear intention by the scientific community to also track the scientific impact of data and software, thus giving proper credit for who makes those available. The strategy adopted by AMS journals, and more recently by AGU, was to require citation of the dataset DOI used in any publication in the references list (https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/authors/journal-and-bams-authors/formatting-and-manuscript-components/references/dataset-references/). The use of DOI for datasets will increase. A few groups already include the dataset DOI in its NetCDF-CF data files, but without a standard, it is hard for a machine to keep track of that.

Justification:

It should be optional, nobody should be forced to adopt DOIs, plus it guarantees backward compatibility.
Although other standards allow the use of DOI, for example the id attribute recommended by ACDD, it conflicts with possible uses of DOIs. For instance, while id is stated to be unique, the same dataset DOI could be used in multiple files with chunks of the dataset assigned by the DOI.
CF reserved attribute ‘references’ is typically tied to a free form text that can list a publication style reference or a URL. “Published or web-based references that describe the data or methods used to produce it.” (CF-1.7). A DOI function differently and the use of a dedicated attribute will enable automated tracking.
It is not being argued that DOI is the best option to link data nor it is a perfect solution, but this is the current standard to scientific impact tracking for articles, and this will not change soon.
A variable level attribute should be allowed to attend cases of distinct contexts, so that datasets could be split or aggregated.

Tiny background on DOI:

DOI is not an URL, despite having a similar syntax and be commonly used in web services called proxies, like https://doi.org/ . Once created, its records are replicated and preserved by libraries with the commitment of long term archiving.
Associated to a DOI there are several fields of information. We could compare a DOI as a unique id for a record in a database with many columns. Some of those columns could be funding agencies, creators, or even a reference to other DOIs like related publications or datasets.
Independent of how many fields associated with a DOI, in the NetCDF-CF dataset file it always goes as a single text, the DOI itself, thus it has a tiny footprint in the file.
One of the metadata fields of a DOI is an URL, also called the landing page. Although this URL could point directly to the data file, the landing page is usually a human-readable page about the data, including a link on how to download the data file itself. A dataset DOI can have a record referring the DOI of the NetCDF-CF documentation, thus giving a metric of the impact of cf-conventions document. Adding additional metadata to the DOI or additional DOIs in the future do not change the DOI and allow for future updates without needing to update or reprocess netCDF data file.
Although it is not common practice, the DOI metadata can be modified. This allows information about the data to be updated without the need to update the reference in the netCDF data file. This would eliminate the need for organizations to reprocess datasets when organizations or contact information changes.

Details

attribute name would be “doi”
multiple DOIs are allowed with space delimiter separation in a character array

Example

// global attributes:
    :Conventions = "CF-1.7, ACDD-1.3" ;
    :title = "California Underwater Glider Network" ;
    :featureType = "trajectoryProfile" ;
    :id = "CUGN_90" ;
    :standard_name_vocabulary = "CF Standard Name Table v62" ;
    :doi = "10.21238/S8SPRAY1618" ;

castelao commented 1 year ago

@JonathanGregory , thanks for checking. I still think it is an important issue but indeed it didn't come to a consensus. It is probably better to close this issue. I suggest just holding it for a few days. Maybe somebody else might be interested in moving/saving these discussions to another convention or standard.

Thanks!

castelao commented 1 year ago

It's time to close this one. Thank you all for your contributions.

@justinbuck, @vturpin, @emmerbodc, @jenseva, some ideas and discussions here might be of your interest.

cf-convention / cf-conventions