Designing the ESS-DIVE Data Repository to be Trusted by the Community and FAIR

The US Department of Energy's (DOE) Environmental Systems Science Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem (ESS-DIVE) data repository is still in its early implementation and growth phase. The focus of the repository has been on three areas of development: data access capabilities, standardization of data, and services to support projects providing data to the repository. Our approach is designed around user experience methods and involves significant discussion and involvement of the community in the design and development of capabilities. The priorities of the repository are continually revised and refined based on input from the community. We are following the developments of CoreTrustSeal and FAIR principles for data, and they are targets we hope to achieve in the future.

Our primary near-term goal is to build a repository that is trusted by the community and that is the preferred storage facility for data generated by the DOE Environmental System Science program. We continually strive to ensure our data are easily findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Achieving this goal requires a partnership with the data providers to gather the necessary metadata and standardized data. One challenge is that FAIR principles are designed to address the needs of the data user, and largely ignore the needs of the data provider. In this talk we present our repository and our approach to working with data providers to move their data toward FAIR principles. We also discuss the challenges we see in incentivizing the data provider to care about some aspects of FAIR data. Our ESS-DIVE team includes members of project teams that store data in the ESS-DIVE repository, and these dual perspectives give us some insight into the motivations and needs of the data provider. The motivations and priorities of data providers do not always align with the needs of the repository.