Journal of Large-Scale Research Facilities
The PID Network Germany is taking this opportunity to present the Open Access Journal of Large-Scale Research Facilities (JLSRF), which is published by Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ). JLSRF publishes articles on large-scale scientific facilities from various scientific disciplines as well as on individual components of large-scale research facilities. This combines several advantages:
Referencing: the articles in JLSRF serve as a reference for researchers who want to refer to large-scale equipment in their publications in order to cite specific equipment. Publishing in the JLSRF introduces a standardized citation style for large-scale equipment, making it easier for other researchers to refer to the same equipment and promoting consistency in scientific articles.
Avoidance of redundancy: By publishing detailed descriptions of the most important devices in separate articles, other authors do not have to refer to these devices every time. This saves time and avoids redundancy in scientific publications.
Versioning: There can be more than one article for a large research facility, as components and settings can change over time. Versioning of the article is possible [1].
Institutional authorship: The JLSRF suggests citing the articles with an institutional authorship to emphasize the institution of the main instrument or research facility.
- Usage Notes: Operators of major instruments can refer to these articles in their terms of use to increase the transparency and traceability of their research infrastructure.
Examples of research infrastructures: Marine stations in Germany
An article on the Helgoland and Sylt marine stations operated by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research is an example of the description of large-scale facilities [2]. These stations serve as permanent research infrastructures that enable precise observation of ecosystem characteristics. By providing ecological time series and access for visiting researchers, they promote national and transnational exchange in marine research. The technical details can be traced transparently and freely accessible on the basis of the article, thus promoting interdisciplinary cooperation. In addition, the article proves that large-scale devices can also function as an educational and communication platform.
Outlook and perspectives
An important goal of the PIDINST system is to facilitate the linking between instruments and journal articles, datasets and other research objects. This could be a starting point for future collaboration between JLSRF and PIDInst: the instrument descriptions in JLSRF and the landing page on the instrument operator's website together provide important documentation that helps scientists to better understand the instruments and their use in scientific experiments [3]. This documentation is designed to be human-readable. Structured metadata linked to persistent identifiers, on the other hand, enable machine readability and processing of information about instruments. These representations of information for humans and machines complement each other.
[1] Example for versioning: https://doi.org/10.17815/jlsrf-4-168