The Coalition for Publishing Data in the Earth and Space Sciences (
COPDESS) connects Earth and space science publishers and data facilities to help translate the aspirations of open, available, and useful data from policy into practice. Since 2015 COPDESS and the 2017-2018
Enabling FAIR Data project have brought repositories, publishers, researchers and funders together in a new and exciting landscape that has resulted in shared goals and guidelines as articulated in the initial
COPDESS Statement of Commitment and the revised
Enabling FAIR Commitment Statement. For example, following these guidelines, the vast majority of Earth-science journals will no longer accept separate data supplements, but instead insist that key data supporting a scholarly publication are made available in reliable/trustworthy repositories that support the FAIR principles.
While the implementation of the new guidelines from the Commitment Statement is progressing with both publishers and repositories, questions and challenges are emerging that require continued dialog and coordination amongst all stakeholders. For example, data facilities are trying to develop practices that would support publisher requirements for ‘recommended’ repositories, including data availability and assurances of quality. But clear agreement is still lacking in the community as to what criteria should be used to determine a ‘recommended’ repository. In the US, for repositories there are criteria for assessing repository use (US OSTP document on "
Desirable Characteristics" ) and there are the tenets of the
CoreTrustSeal certification, but publishers work internationally and the US criteria do not apply globally.
This session seeks to be a forum for all stakeholders - repositories, publishers, researchers and funders - to get together and provide updates about ongoing activities and developments, and to identify obstacles and gaps that require further discussion, alignment, and coordination in order to ensure continued progress. We have therefore structured this session to include reports/updates from repositories and publishers, as well as breakout discussions to identify priorities for the next series of conversations that COPDESS should facilitate and drive.
Desired Outcomes from this session: Designing the Next Conversations- Next steps for creating a disciplinary-focussed dialog with editors/publishers and repositories (editors, publishers, repositories)
- Better aligning researcher engagement: working together to develop standard messaging across publishers, editors, repositories to the researcher (all)
- Getting funders to better support repositories and helping repositories to raise a consistent value proposition to the funders (repositories, funders)
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View Session NotesView Presentations: See Session Notes above
Takeaways- What did we discover?
- Requirements from the publishers are inconsistent
- and it is hard to manage for repositories to meet all of them.
- Funding repositories is hard
- But this is a crucial conversation/effort that needs to happen in order to continue to grow the data sharing culture.
- Repositories should be engaged during the project proposal/Data Management planning phase.
- Structure data correctly for community reuse as part of the project/experiment workflow vs having to reengineer the data/metadata after a project has completed
- How can we help each other?
- Education of researchers is necessary so they can understand why all the metadata is necessary
- Need for incentives for researchers
- Having COPDESS materials on web to point to is important
- Bridging between data curators, repository managers, researchers, and publishers.
- What knowledge and resources do we have to share?
- Existing budgetary strategies that are currently employed.
- Existing resources to support project PIs and authors with their data management challenges
- Important remaining questions?
- How could we encourage funders to participate in the data/repository discussions?
