COPDESS, the Coalition for Publishing Data in the Earth and Space Sciences (
https://copdess.org/), was established in October 2014 as a platform for Earth and Space Science publishers and data repositories to jointly define, implement, and promote common policies and procedures for the publication and citation of data and other research results (e.g., samples, software, etc.) across Earth Science journals. In late 2018, COPDESS became a cluster of ESIP to give the initiative the needed sustainability to support a long-term FAIR publishing workflow ecosystem and be a springboard to pursue future enhancements of it.
In 2017, with funding from the Arnold Foundation, the ‘Enabling FAIR Data Project’ (
https://copdess.org/enabling-fair-data-project/) moved mountains towards implementing the policies and standards that connect researchers, publishers, and data repositories in their desire to accelerate scientific discovery through open and FAIR data. Implementation of the new FAIR policies has advanced rapidly across Earth, Space, and Environmental journals, but supporting infrastructure, guidelines, and training for researchers, publishers, and data repositories has yet to catch up. The primary challenges are:
- Repositories struggle to keep up with the demands of researchers, who want to be able to instantly deposit data and obtain a DOI, without considering the data quality/data ingest requirements and review procedures of individual repositories - producing a situation where data publication is inconsistent in quality and content.
- Many publishers who have signed the Commitment Statement for FAIR Data (https://copdess.org/enabling-fair-data-project/commitment-statement-in-the-earth-space-and-environmental-sciences/) agree with it at a high, conceptual level. However, many journal editors and reviewers lack clarity on how to validate that datasets, which underpin scholarly publications, conform with the Commitment Statement.
- Researchers experience confusion, and in some cases barriers to publication of their papers whilst they try and meet the requirements of the commitment statement. Clarity of requirements, timelines, and criteria for selecting repositories are needed to minimize the barriers to the joint publication of papers and associated data.
Funders have a role to play, in that they need to allow for time and resources required to curate data and ensure compliance, particularly WRT to the assignment of valid DOIs. Funders can also begin to reward those researchers who do take the effort to properly manage and make their data available, in a similar way to how they reward scholarly publications and citation of those publications.
The goal of this session is to start a conversation on developing an integrated publishing workflow ecosystem the seamlessly integrates researchers, repositories, publishers and funders. Perspectives from all viewpoints will be presented.
Notes document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12M0F6mcUZSn2GdBN-Id__smXhYxbLzKDrAViPAgnH6w/edit?usp=sharingPresentations:
View Recording: https://youtu.be/x6a1QRNbifQTakeaways- COPDESS has moved to ESIP as a cluster to ensure the sustainability of the project to address the publishing & citation of research data
