Establish Open Science practices throughout the geoscience community in Germany with the FID GEO services

The world of geosciences is very broadly positioned on the path to Open Science. The development of a research infrastructure must therefore address the fundamental needs within each discipline. In the geosciences, the spectrum of requirements for the data alone ranges from highly standardized real-time, large data made available internationally (e.g. in seismology or geodesy) to the full spectrum of small and highly variable data from long-tail data communities with best practices of sharing data via tables printed in research articles.

FID GEO is the specialized information service for Geosciences in Germany offering publication services and consulting around the full spectrum of Open Science in the Geosciences since 2016. Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), FID GEO is a service of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) and the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB). The project provides broad access to digital knowledge resources, contributing to an open information infrastructure. The service portfolio includes electronic publishing of research results in our domain repositories. GEO-LEOe-docs, the repository for texts and geological maps, is hosted at SUB and GFZ Data Services, the domain repository for research data and scientific software, is hosted at GFZ. In addition, we offer digitization services, especially for (older) journal series and reports and a broad consulting portfolio on Open Science topics. Hereby, FID GEO advocates a holistic view of the chain of scientific results – from sample to data and software to scientific articles – and promotes that the individual elements are digitally linked in the best possible way.

From the beginning on, FID GEO developed services that facilitate the shift towards Open Science by engaging the geoscience community. The FID GEO website, our newsletter and Twitter account are tools to connect us with the community. We inform the majority of the German geoscientists with regular publications in the journal “GMIT - Geowissenschaftliche Mitteilungen”, which is also being published on GEO-LEOe-docs since 2021. Over the last six years, active interactions with the community during conferences, workshops, talks and through online questionnaires, revealed that there still is a high demand for information on open science practices.  Workshops and talks have proven to be very successful tools to meet the large need for discussion. They not only allow us to directly address questions or uncertainties regarding practical aspects of open science practices, but they also offer the suitable framework to prepare the information specifically for each research group. To improve our publication services and to intensify the open information culture in the geosciences, FID GEO collaborates with strategic (inter)national initiatives (like NFDI4Earth), with German geosciences societies and other library-related projects supporting the development of open research data infrastructures.