Editorial

Open Data for Evidence Based Practice

Lorie Kloda

Editor-in-Chief

Associate University Librarian, Planning and Community Relations

Concordia University

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

2018 Kloda. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the same or similar license to this one.

DOI: 10.18438/eblip29505

As Editor-in-Chief I’m very pleased to announce the journal’s new policy on data sharing. The policy is available on the EBLIP website submission page (at the very end): https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/eblip/index.php/EBLIP/about/submissions. The editorial team spent almost a year discussing the idea of such a policy – whether it was worth having one, whether it would advocate for mandatory or voluntary data sharing, and how detailed it should be. We drafted and revised the policy to be sure that our intentions were clear and to enable authors wishing to share data to be able to do so in a straightforward manner. The end result, as you will see, is rather detailed and references data standards and recommendations from universities and organizations.

Since its inception, EBLIP has been an open access journal, advocating for access to research in order to support evidence based decision making. Open data is an extension of the same principle as sharing research data can benefit scholarship in many ways. Though researchers in library and information studies may still be new to the idea of disseminating data alongside their published articles, data sharing is becoming increasingly popular and EBLIP wanted to be prepared for data submissions and to encourage future authors to prepare to store and disseminate their research data ethically. If you have comments regarding the journal’s data sharing policy, please contact me or a member of the editorial team to share these.

In this issue, I would like to welcome our new Production Editor, Rachel Hinrichs. Rachel is experienced with the journal as she served as the Editorial Intern for the past year and a half. She takes over from Michelle Dunaway, who is stepping down after six years (that’s 24 issues!) in the role. Before being appointed as Production Editor in 2012, Michelle was also the Editorial Intern starting in 2011. On behalf of the editorial team I would like to express my sincere appreciation for Michelle’s contributions to EBLIP over the previous eight years. We will not, however, have to say farewell to Michelle entirely, as she will stay on with the journal as an Editorial Advisor and we can continue to take advantage of her expertise. With Rachel now taking on the role of Production Editor, Kimberly MacKenzie has been appointed as Editorial Intern.