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Enhanced Publication of the month for December 2012: Finance, inequality and the poor by Prof. Thorsten Beck (Tilburg University)

Since February 2011, SURFfoundation has been awarding a monthly prize for the Enhanced Publication (EP) of the Month. Enhanced publications are a new type of scientific/scholarly communication whereby researchers make publications available online in combination with other material. This includes such things as research reports that are made publicly available on the Internet or film clips to explain the research method to the general public. To highlight the possibilities offered by enhanced publications, SURFfoundation is awarding a prize each month in 2011 to a good example of such enhancement.

For researchers, publishing and sharing research data raises the profile of their research. The article Finance, inequality and the poor in the Journal of Economic Growth is an example of a meaningful link between the publication and the underlying dataset. Citing research data is very much easier with the standard citation reference that is provided with the data storage. Researchers can also indicate for themselves the access restrictions that they want to apply to the research data concerned. The article Finance, inequality and the poor has been selected as the Enhanced Publication of the Month for December 2011. Its authors are Thorsten Beck (Tilburg University), Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, and Ross Levine.

The full text of the enhanced publication is available via a link to the publisher and to the repository at Tilburg University. The research data is available via Network of European Economists Online and Tilburg University Dataverse.

 
Prof. Thorsten Beck receives the cake for Enhanced Publication of the Month

Benefits for researchers
Thorsten Beck (Professor of Economics and Chairman of the European Banking Center) is pleased with the link between his publication and his research data. “I often receive inquiries from students wanting to replicate our results or researchers wanting to use the data for similar research projects. Having my data posted on the Internet makes it easier for everyone to access it. It is also easy to cite my dataset with a ready-to-use standard data citation reference. And if necessary I can set detailed access conditions for my research data.”

Dataverse Network
This Tilburg enhanced publication makes use of the Dataverse Network for storage. The Dataverse Network gives institutions, research groups and individual researchers a simple way of archiving data and sharing it with others. Developed and maintained by Harvard University, it is an open source application for publishing, citing, and searching for research data. The Network makes material produced by Tilburg University researchers available via the local Get It! search engine and also via Economists Online, Google, and the Dataverse Network (DVN).
 
 
The "publication details" and the "data and supplementary material" are presented together.

Library service
Linking publications to the associated research data is a service provided for researchers by the library at Tilburg University. This is the result of the Open Data and Publications (ODaP) project, which receives funding from the SURFshare programme. The university library is pleased to be able to provide this service for researchers. Thomas Place, the academic services manager, explains: “The information specialists at the university library don’t just know about publications – they can also play a role in acquiring, describing, and linking data.”

More information
• Finance, inequality and the poor
• Open Data and Publications (ODaP) project
• Film clip about Enhanced Publications, including an explanation of the ODaP project: 
• Enhanced publications: www.surffoundation.nl/enhancedpublications 

About SURFshare
SURFshare’s aim is to open up a wide range of possibilities for finding, creating, distributing, and publishing research results. That is possible because ICT not only speeds up standard communication processes but also changes the nature of the research cycle itself. SURFfoundation’s intention with the SURFshare programme is to create a common infrastructure that will facilitate access to research information and make it possible for researchers to share that information.

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