EGU22-4996
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-4996
EGU General Assembly 2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Why we need to highlight FAIR and Open Data and how to do it with EASYDAB

Anette Ganske1, Angelika Heil2, Hannes Thiemann2, and Andrea Lammert2
Anette Ganske et al.
  • 1TIB – Leibniz-Informationszentrum Technik und Naturwissenschaften, Forschung und Entwicklung, Hannover, Germany (anette.ganske@tib.eu)
  • 2Data Management Department, German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ), Bundesstr. 45a, 20146 Hamburg, Germany

The FAIR1 data principles are important for the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of data. Therefore, many repositories make huge efforts to curate data so that they become FAIR and assign DataCite2 DOIs to archived data for increasing the findability. Nevertheless, recent investigations (Strecker3, 2021) show that many datasets published with a DataCite DOI don’t meet all aspects of the FAIR principles, as they are missing important information for the reuse and interoperability in their metadata. Further examinations of data from the Earth System Sciences (ESS) reveal that especially automatic processability is suboptimal, e.g. because of missing persistent identifiers for creators and affiliations, missing information about geolocations or time ranges of simulations. As well, many datasets either don’t have any licence information or a non-open licence.

The question arises of how datasets with open licences4 and high-quality metadata can be highlighted so that they stand out from the crowd of published data. One solution is the newly developed branding for FAIR and open ESS data, called EASYDAB5 (Earth System Data Branding).  It consists of a logo that earmarks landing pages of those datasets with a DataCite DOI, an open licence, open file formats6, rich metadata, and which were quality controlled by the responsible repository. The EASYDAB logo is protected and may only be used by repositories that agree to follow the EASYDAB Guidelines7. These guidelines define principles on how to achieve high metadata quality of ESS datasets by demanding specific metadata information. Domain-specific quality guidelines define the mandatory metadata for a self-explaining description of the data. One example is a quality guideline for atmospheric model data - the ATMODAT Standard8. It prescribes not only the metadata for the files but also for the DOI and the landing page. The atmodat data checker9 additionally helps data providers and repositories to check whether data files meet the requirements of the ATMODAT Standard.

The use of the EASYDAB logo is free of charge, but repositories must sign a contract with TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology10. TIB will control in the future that datasets with landing pages highlighted with EASYDAB indeed follow the EASYDAB Guidelines to ensure that EASYDAB remains a branding for high-quality data. 

Using EASYDAB, repositories can indicate their efforts to publish data with high-quality metadata. The EASYDAB logo also indicates to data users that the dataset is quality controlled and can be easily reused.

 

1: https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/

2: https://datacite.org/

3: https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/23590/BHR470_Strecker.pdf?sequence=1

4: https://opendefinition.org/licenses/

5: https://www.easydab.de

6: http://opendatahandbook.org/guide/en/appendices/file-formats/

7: https://cera-www.dkrz.de/WDCC/ui/cerasearch/entry?acronym=EASYDAB_Guideline_v1.1

8: https://doi.org/10.35095/WDCC/atmodat_standard_en_v3_0

9: https://github.com/AtMoDat/atmodat_data_checker

10: https://www.tib.eu/en/

How to cite: Ganske, A., Heil, A., Thiemann, H., and Lammert, A.: Why we need to highlight FAIR and Open Data and how to do it with EASYDAB, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-4996, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-4996, 2022.

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