Collaborative Research: Cross-Cutting Improvements: Open Science Roadmap for Research Infrastructures

This project will study data management practices at user facilities with the goal of improving how research data is organized, stored, and shared. User facilities represent a major investment from NSF and each one has unique data formats and cyberinfrastructure. The project will target selected NSF Major and mid-scale facilities to examine current practices in order to create a roadmap aligned with FAIR principles that facilities can use for improvements in data management and to support open science and improve the national research infrastructure ecosystem. Current data management practices at selected user facilities will be assessed through surveys of the facility personnel and of the facilities' users. The assessment will include topics relevant to the FAIR principles, including data provenance, transfer, packaging, and storage, as well as how data is enriched and deposited for dissemination and citation. Best practices and data formats will be identified, and a roadmap will be created. The roadmap will be shared publicly for feedback through community-building workshops, and elements will be evaluated with hands-on pilot projects at the surveyed facilities. The findings are expected to be useful not only to the surveyed facilities, but to other user facilities and research facilities broadly for assessing and improving their data infrastructure. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.