A platform that supports the publication of research data as a citable artefact — assigning a persistent identifier, presenting a landing page, and applying review, curation, or peer-review processes — distinct from purely depositional storage.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
Scientific Data (Nature Research) as a data journal publishing peer-reviewed data descriptors.
Is an instance
PANGAEA as a curation-heavy data publication platform for earth-science data.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A drop-box file-sharing tool is not a data publication platform.
Not an instance
A preprint server publishes papers, not data, and is not a data publication platform (though it may host data-descriptor preprints).

Editorial commentary

Data publication platforms include data journals (Scientific Data, Earth System Science Data, Data in Brief), peer-review-enabled repositories (Dryad with its journal partnerships), and curation-heavy thematic platforms (PANGAEA). The defining feature is treatment of the dataset as a publishable object: it is given a citation form, a landing page with structured metadata, often a CC0 or CC-BY licence, and (in the data-journal case) a published data descriptor article. Data publication is a recognised research output and contributes to attribution and credit.

References

Costello M.J., 'Motivating online publication of data', BioScience 59(5), 2009.
Lawrence B., Jones C. et al., 'Citation and peer review of data: Moving towards formal data publication', International Journal of Digital Curation 6(2), 2011.

Also known as

Data journal · Curated data publication venue

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Data publication platform"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-publication-platform" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-publication-platform",
  "name": "Data publication platform",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-publication-platform",
  "description": "A platform that supports the publication of research data as a citable artefact — assigning a persistent identifier, presenting a landing page, and applying review, curation, or peer-review processes — distinct from purely depositional storage.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/data-infrastructure#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-publication-platform",
  "sameAs": [
    "Data journal",
    "Curated data publication venue"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:06:21",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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