Enabling FAIRness with PIDs

Research advances now and into the future depend on data, software and data products being open, accessible and reusable.  While complete success resides in this occurring across the research landscape, every domain has approached this problem and related opportunities in different ways.  With critical importance placed on discoverable and usable data, the Earth and space sciences are developing community approaches to cultivating a culture that values data sustainability.

The American Geophysical Union, with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, convened the Enabling FAIR Data project in late 2017 to develop standards that will connect researchers, publishers, and data repositories in the Earth and space sciences to enable FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) data on a large scale.  Crucially, this effort gathered participants from across the Earth and space science landscape; researchers, repositories, publishers, funders, and infrastructure.  A number of agreed-upon best practices have emerged and often revolve around persistent identifiers; metadata and identifier standards; data services; common taxonomies; landing pages at repositories to expose the metadata and standard repository information; standard data citation; and standard integration into editorial peer review workflows.

A second project has been proposed that would pair transdisciplinary science-synthesis teams with a data science teams from five nations, allowing for assessment of data linkages including examining repositories, journals, and other infrastructure that allows data citation and attribution to assess the extent that data and PIDs are FAIR and when reused, that scientists receive the proper attribution and credit. Overall this work will provide a broad landscape of practices, identify where improvements are needed and can be most efficiently implemented and can provide the most benefit.

This talk will provide an overview of the project(s) outcomes to date, including the significant support for PID adoption and integration throughout the community.  It will also present several calls to action for participants, seeking to enable other communities to convene similar efforts and PID enthusiasm.