The Environmental Data Initiative's pipeline to establishing data curation and publication practices in the ecological research community
Abstract
The Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) is an NSF-funded data repository accelerating and expanding the publication of environmental research data. EDI provides support and resources to the ecological research community to help curate and publish high-quality data and metadata, to ensure the long-term preservation and reusability of research data. In addition to direct support by staff data scientists, EDI has developed an extensive outreach and training program with the aim to empower research communities in adopting a routine data publishing process of their own.
EDI uses a number of approaches, some of which have been particularly effective and successful. EDI's traditional training methods of consultation, webinars and workshops have been complemented recently by a "pipeline" approach in which training activities build on each other: 1. EDI trains a cohort of Summer fellows (Bachelor's, Master's, PhD) in an intensive one week in-person session. 2. The fellows then are hosted by research centers for about two months and gain hands-on experience in ecological data publishing as well as develop a long-term data publishing strategy for their host site. 3. Data publishing workshops for the entire research group or institution are offered where an EDI trainer travels to the organization and conducts a condensed 2 day workshop covering the process of data publishing and addresses the specific data management needs of the group. 4. Metadata and data curation parties in which research group members get together to curate their accumulated research data sets are encouraged. An EDI trainer is available remotely to immediately answer questions. We have found that applying those four educational approaches in a successional "pipeline" provides a good foundation for establishing an enduring data management and data publishing capability for research groups in the ecological research community. Furthermore, recent fellows have all found employment in ecological data management.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMIN51F0698G
- Keywords:
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- 0825 Teaching methods;
- EDUCATION;
- 0845 Instructional tools;
- EDUCATION;
- 1910 Data assimilation;
- integration and fusion;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1912 Data management;
- preservation;
- rescue;
- INFORMATICS