OECD has released We Need Publishing Standards for Datasets and Data Tables.
Here's an excerpt:
Datasets are a significant part of the scholarly record and are being published more and more frequently, either formally or informally. Many publishers are beginning to link to them from their journals and authors are trying to cite them in their articles. Librarians would like a way to manage them alongside other publications. In short, they need to be integrated into the scholarly information system so that authors, readers and librarians can use, find and manage them as easily as they do working papers, journal articles and books.
In this paper, OECD is proposing some standards for citing and bibliographic management of datasets and data tables. OECD is currently building a new online publishing platform which will host working papers, journals, books, tables and datasets. Due to be launched in mid-2009, this platform will use the standards proposed above. Librarians will be offered MARC 21 records for datasets, alongside records for OECD books and periodicals. Users of the platform will be invited to download citations for datasets and tables in a form compatible with popular bibliographic management systems. All the DOIs for the datasets and tables will be deposited with CrossRef, ready for other publishers to use.
