Enabling FAIR Research in Earth Science through Research Objects
This work addresses the problem of enabling FAIR and reusable research for Earth Science communities, though it is incremental as it builds on existing FAIR practices and infrastructure.
The paper tackled the challenge of adopting FAIR principles in Earth Science by developing an extended research object model, tools for persistent identification, metadata generation, and quality checklists, integrated into the ROHub platform, resulting in enhanced visibility and reuse of scientific resources as measured by community uptake indicators.
Data-intensive science communities are progressively adopting FAIR practices that enhance the visibility of scientific breakthroughs and enable reuse. At the core of this movement, research objects contain and describe scientific information and resources in a way compliant with the FAIR principles and sustain the development of key infrastructure and tools. This paper provides an account of the challenges, experiences and solutions involved in the adoption of FAIR around research objects over several Earth Science disciplines. During this journey, our work has been comprehensive, with outcomes including: an extended research object model adapted to the needs of earth scientists; the provisioning of digital object identifiers (DOI) to enable persistent identification and to give due credit to authors; the generation of content-based, semantically rich, research object metadata through natural language processing, enhancing visibility and reuse through recommendation systems and third-party search engines; and various types of checklists that provide a compact representation of research object quality as a key enabler of scientific reuse. All these results have been integrated in ROHub, a platform that provides research object management functionality to a wealth of applications and interfaces across different scientific communities. To monitor and quantify the community uptake of research objects, we have defined indicators and obtained measures via ROHub that are also discussed herein.