Open and FAIR sample based data sharing through the IEDA2 facility

IEDA, the Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance, is a unique collaborative data infrastructure that provides and continuously evolves a comprehensive ecosystem of data, tools, and services that support researchers in the Geosciences to share and access sample data following the FAIR data principles and ensure open, reproducible, and transparent science practices.

The ‘next generation’ of IEDA - IEDA2 - was funded by the US National Science Foundation in 2022 for 5 years to advance the existing data systems and services of EarthChem (geochemistry data repository, data synthesis, and data access portals), LEPR/TraceDs (synthesis of data from petrological experiments), and SESAR (System for Earth Sample Registration), modernizing system architecture to better support computational and data-driven research, improving usability, and growing a diverse and inclusive user audience through education and engagement.

Our target is to enable a common understanding of existing information that is validated through expert data curation to enable transparent and reproducible (re)use and analysis of data, inform peer review, and guide future research directions. Such common understanding cannot develop unless the community can access and assess the same information.

This collective vision of the data will improve the ability of the entire community to assess the context and significance of new data and models, allow reviewers to evaluate new models that are calibrated using the data, and facilitate new generations of research.