Scientific community needs: FAIR and credible data repositories. The case of MedOBIS Repository and MAPWORMS Project.

We live in the era of producing big and diverse data, which has exceeded the capacity of conventional practices and databases. Thus, the challenge we face today is in figuring out the best way to process, standardize, and harmonize of the information - data gathered and as a last step to share this information with the community. When it comes to scientific data, there is only one safe way out to invest in FAIR Research Infrastructures, such as MedOBIS.

MedOBIS is the Mediterranean node of OBIS and it is hosted by the Institute of Marine Biology, Biotechnology and Aquaculture of HCMR in Crete (Greece). MedOBIS acts as a Research Repository for both historical and modern scientific datasets, on which the principles of FAIR and Open data are applied. All biogeographic data, and hopefully in the near future genetic data as well, can safely be findable, accessed, interoperable and re-usable through MedOBIS.

The need for trustworthy research repositories has become more and more evident, because every researcher, wants his work to live beyond individual research projects’ lifecycle. This is the case of the HORIZON-EIC project, entitled MAPWORMS. MAPWORMS is a challenging collaborative research project, which aims to propose robots that are inspired by simplified forms of marine Annelida, able to perform tasks in response to environmental stimuli.

In the MAPWORMS Data Management Plan was explicitly mentioned that (meta)data will be deposited in an online and open-access repository. In particular, for distributional/ georeferenced data, it is envisioned that a metadata template will be accompanied every sampling event, in order to collect as much information as possible. Regarding data, these will be sent to the MedOBIS to be standardised, quality controlled, and finally published, under CC-BY License. Additionally, published literature about annelids will be thoroughly examined in order to collect historical distributional data for annelid species and a list of proposed literature will be created.  The purpose of this list is to identify interesting and valuable historical datasets that could be digitised and published at a later stage.