The project EcoNAOS: vision and practice towards an open approach in the Northern Adriatic Sea ecological observatory

The Open Science approach delineates high and inspiring principles. In order to really root them into the scientific community, a cultural shift must occur that can be fostered and achieved mainly through the development of practical case studies. This is particularly relevant in the field of ecology, a highly multidisciplinary science, where the Open Science issue has become a matter of discussion only in very recent years. In particular, in the context of long-term ecological research, enabling open sharing of in-situ and derived long-term ecological data is required to advance research and education in the European and global networks.

The creation of marine ecological observatories, able to arrange and maintain integrated, harmonized and coherent long-term ecological observations, is stressed as a relevant step at the European level, for sustaining European marine policies. The Italian national flagship project RITMARE ("Italian research for the sea", http://www.ritmare.it/en/) fostered the development of a marine ecological observatory in the Northern Adriatic Sea (NAS), one of the 25 research parent sites belonging to the Italian Long-Term Ecological Research Network (LTER-Italy, http://www.lteritalia.it), through a dedicated research line. Within this context, we developed a specific task, aimed at testing and applying the Open Science approach to the NAS ecological observatory: "EcoNAOS - Ecological Northern Adriatic Open Science Observatory System". We present our plans and ideas for the application of the Open Science principles, starting from the 50-year ecological dataset of plankton and related biogeochemical parameters collected in the NAS, mainly in the Gulf of Venice. We introduce each of the different steps needed for "opening science": research ideas statement, raw data collection, data harmonization (structural, syntactic and semantic), ancillary data collection/recovery and metadatation, data and metadata publication, software publication, publication of results, and data citation. In order to share different expertise and include different points of view as essential outcomes themselves, researchers from the field of LTER and data management were involved in EcoNAOS since its start. Our final goal is to demonstrate that a change of vision is possible, leading from "publishing ASAP" to "sharing data and information and collaborating ASAP".