FID GEO: Promoting Open Science in the Geosciences

The change towards Open Science practices is increasingly demanded by science policy and affects the publication culture as well as the information infrastructures. This includes the transition to Open Access for journals and publishers (including the development of new business models), as well as the growing need to make data, scientific software and samples underlying scientific results available for the general public.  

The DFG-funded Specialised Information Service for Geoscience FID GEO (Fachinformationsdienst Geowissenschaften), aims at (1) reducing structural deficits in the area of electronic information and (2) promoting Open Science throughout the research life cycle. The service is hosted at the Göttingen State and University Library in Lower Saxony (SUB Göttingen) and the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. The FID GEO team is made up of highly connected librarians, data publishing professionals, and geoscientists. Over the past five years, FID GEO has become a key player for the promotion of Open Science in the geosciences and occupies a central position for connecting researchers, data repositories, information infrastructures, German geosciences societies and publishers. FID GEO actively offers data and text publication services via their associated repositories GFZ Data Services and GEO-LEOe-docs as well as digitisation on demand of print-only geoscience literature and maps.

FID GEO aims at informing the geoscientific community about all aspects of Open Science on one hand, and is available for questions and support, e.g., during data publications, the transition to an Open Access model for journals of geosciences societies or getting a DOI for an article in the Green Open Access model. An online questionnaire in 2021 revealed that there is a high demand for information. This regards particularly topics such as licenses, persistent identifiers (ORCID, ROR, IGSN) and measures to ensure data quality and integrity in order to enable high quality, citable data publications. In the first funding phases of the project, workshops and talks have proven to be very successful tools to meet the large need for discussion, as they allow to directly address questions or uncertainties regarding practical aspects. Information events are prepared specifically for the individual target groups: researchers, German geosciences societies and members of infrastructural support units, like libraries (e.g., while societies are more interested in the development of guidelines, librarians have specific interest in licensing and copyright issues). To intensify the open information culture in the geosciences, FID GEO collaborates with strategic (inter)national initiatives, such as NFDI4Earth, COPDESS and OneGeochemistry.