Operationalizing the Replication Standard: A Case Study of the Data Curation and Verification Workflow for Scholarly Journals

In response to widespread concerns about the integrity of research published in scholarly journals, several initiatives have emerged that are promoting research transparency through access to data underlying published scientific findings. Journal editors, in particular, have made a commitment to research transparency by issuing data policies that require authors to submit their data, code, and documentation to data repositories to allow for public access to the data. In the case of the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) Data Replication Policy, the data also must undergo an independent verification process in which materials are reviewed for quality as a condition of final manuscript publication and acceptance. Aware of the specialized expertise of the data archives, AJPS called upon the Odum Institute Data Archive to provide a data review service that performs data curation and verification of replication datasets. This article presents a case study of the collaboration between AJPS and the Odum Institute Data Archive to develop a workflow that bridges manuscript publication and data review processes. The case study describes the challenges and the successes of the workflow integration, and offers lessons learned that may be applied by other data archives that are considering expanding their services to include data curation and verification services to support reproducible research. Received 22 January 2018 ~ Accepted 27 April 2018 Correspondence should be addressed to Thu-Mai Christian, 228E Davis Library, CB# 3355, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3355. Email: thumai@email.unc.edu An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 13 International Digital Curation Conference. The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. The IJDC is published by the University of Edinburgh on behalf of the Digital Curation Centre. ISSN: 1746-8256. URL: http://www.ijdc.net/ Copyright rests with the authors. This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence, version 4.0. For details please see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ International Journal of Digital Curation 2018, Vol. 13, Iss. 1, 114–124 114 http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v13i1.555 DOI: 10.2218/ijdc.v13i1.555 doi:10.2218/ijdc.v13i1.555 Thu-Mai Christian et al. | 115