Data Paper on Antarctic Macrobenthic Biodiversity Publicly Available

Hydrocorals also known as sea fan in the Antarctic.
Credit: Julian Gutt, Alfred Wegener Institute

A data paper on Antarctic macrobenthic communities from approximately 90 different expeditions in the region published in the open access journal Nature Conservation is now openly available to the public under a Creative Commons By license. Macrobenthic organisms are organisms that live at the bottom of a water column and are can be seen by the naked eye.

Data papers are journal publications that describe a dataset or a group of datasets. It contains facts about the group that the data is representing, much similar to a data table. It does not contain any opinions, hypothesis or arguments.

Data papers are used to provide a citable journal publication that brings scholarly credit to data publishers; to describe the data in a structured human-readable form; and to bring the existence of the data to the attention of the scholarly community.