DataSeer’s goal is to move data sharing away from broadly worded policies and guidelines, and instead show researchers what they need to do with the datasets from their particular manuscript. Using AI and NLP, scientific texts are scanned for sentences describing data collection, and offered best-practice advice for sharing that type of data. Funders, journals, and institutions can use DataSeer to find all of the data associated with a corpus of articles, or use it to promote compliance with their data sharing policies.

Problem Solving

Researchers find complying with data sharing policies difficult.

• Which datasets should be shared?
• Where should the data go?
• What format should they be in?
• What about privacy, copyright, and licensing?

Solution: DataSeer provides best-practice sharing advice for each dataset in an article then helps authors to share it.

Publishers and Journal Editors are seeking to promote open data but lack the tools to develop practical and enforceable policies. They are seeking to find enforcement of data policies time-consuming and expensive, or weak and inconsistent. This is because journals and funders can’t work out what data the authors should share.

Solution: Dataseer tools can audit data sharing and other open science practices for both published articles and current content, monitoring the impact of publishers’ policies. Editors can use the tools to ensure authors deliver consistent, cost-effective and scalable open research data.

Funding agencies want data arising from their grants to be public and of maximum benefit, but can’t be sure that researchers have shared the right data in the right place.

Solution: DataSeer can rapidly assess a corpus of research articles and list the underlying datasets, and work with funded authors prior to publication to identify and share data that needs to be made public.

Tim Vines is the Founder and CEO at DataSeer. Prior to that he founded Axios Review, an independent peer review company that helped authors find journals that wanted their paper. He was the Managing Editor for the journal Molecular Ecology for eight years, where he led their adoption of data sharing and numerous other initiatives. He writes for the industry-leading Scholarly Kitchen blog, and has published research papers on peer review, data sharing, and reproducibility (including one that was covered by Vanity Fair). He has a PhD in evolutionary ecology from the University of Edinburgh and resides in Vancouver, Canada.