Supporting Paleomagnetic and Rock Magnetic Scientific Workflows with the Magnetics Information Consortium (MagIC) Database

The Magnetics Information Consortium (MagIC) supports the international rock and paleomagnetic communities by maintaining an open community digital data archive directed by principal investigators who are both producers and consumers of these data. With continuous support from NSF since 2003 and close collaboration with the communities, MagIC has developed a platform to improve these communities' research capacity by removing barriers for contributing annotated standardized datasets and by making these data discoverable for future studies.

The MagIC Database is a repository hosted by the EarthRef infrastructure supported by Oregon State University and the University of California, San Diego. EarthRef is a trusted ORCID member organization with login integration and future support for publishing contribution metadata to ORCID profiles. Users, authenticated with ORCID iDs, can construct datasets by uploading text files and Excel spreadsheets online or through the API to their private workspace. These datasets adhere to a hierarchical set of tables defined by the MagIC Data Model, which was designed by the communities to reflect their scientific workflow. Each contribution is associated with a (preferably peer-reviewed) publication describing the procedures that produced the dataset. Private contributions can be shared with collaborators and reviewers prior to making the dataset public. Once the contribution passes validation against the data model, the contributor can make the dataset public and a Data DOI is minted with the California Digital Library EZID service to Crossref and DataCite. Both the MagIC Data Model and the MagIC contributions are versioned and persisted with AWS S3 to guarantee reproducibility and support updates.

MagIC is committed to following and defining best practices to support these communities in addressing grand challenges and achieving compliance with FAIR Data practices. MagIC currently archives versioned datasets for >4k publications that include magnetic data from >180k sites derived from >6M measurements. These contributions are compatible with the PmagPy paleomagnetic analysis software, described with the Schema.org vocabulary as JSON-LD objects, and subsequently indexed by EarthCube GeoCODES, EPOS Multi-scale Laboratories, and GFZ Data Services.