Disciplinary Improvements: Open and FAIR samples: maturing the sample data ecosystem

The project aims to advance the Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable (FAIR) principles within the Earth and Space Science sample data ecosystem by promoting the adoption of persistent identifiers infrastructure (PID) across the geoscience community. The project plans to achieve the goal by engaging with four types of key stakeholders: researchers, sample repositories, data repositories, and scholarly publishers, through community engagement, education, training, and coordination. Scientific research across many disciplines relies on material samples as a basic element for reference, study, and experimentation. Given the high cost of collecting and curating these samples, it is essential to maximize research investments by ensuring samples and related data are open and FAIR. This can be done by a) assigning persistent identifiers to samples; b) persistently associating samples with their resulting research products; and c) citing samples in research literature. The infrastructure to support these actions is fragmented and incomplete, but uptake of best practices is growing. To advance adoption of open science practices in sample-based research, the project will engage four key stakeholders in the sample data ecosystem: (1) researchers, (2) sample repositories, (3) data repositories, and (4) scholarly publishers. For each community, the team will conduct an analysis of the current adoption of relevant open science practices such as usage of sample persistent identifiers (PIDs) and sample citation. Informed by this work, the group will organize these communities to begin realizing the vision of a functioning sample data ecosystem, where samples and their research products are fully described, persistently linked, and FAIR. This award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering is jointly supported by the Directorate for Geosciences. 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.