The academic community needs better curation and authorship standards for data, according to a committee of the US National Academies. In For Attribution — Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards, published on 19 November, the Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI) presents views from experts in data curation across all scientific disciplines. It says that scientific data — such as measurements and images — should be made available for scrutiny online or through an archive or repository, and that researchers should be given full credit for their efforts in creating those data. The report notes that some scientific associations, including the American Geophysical Union, endorse giving the same importance to the publication of scientific data as to the publication of papers.

Data citation, the committee says, gives authors proper credit, makes them accountable and helps to make science reproducible. Although it offers no formal recommendations, the report suggests that digital object identifiers similar to those used for research papers would provide a permanent online address for data sets and allow the data to be cited formally.

“People are using other people's data more often, so they need a way to cite and attribute sources,” says Paul Uhlir, the committee rapporteur and director of the BRDI. “Up to now, there has been no convention for it. That's really behind the whole rise in calls for data citation and attribution standards — it's an infrastructure issue. Those people need credit.”

The report notes that questions remain regarding how to decide which data are curated, who would pay to maintain data in repositories or archives and who would peer review data and how.

Uhlir says that how often a researcher's data are cited is likely to become an important career metric. The report suggests that it could be incorporated into tenure decisions, as paper citations and journal impact factors are now.

For Attribution is the first of several expected publications on the subject. The BRDI will contribute to a report to be released next year by the international Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), part of the International Council for Science in Paris on current practices in data curation and authorship. A final report from CODATA presenting best practices and recommendations is expected by 2014.