The NFDI4Earth Living Handbook

The NFDI4Earth – the National Research Data Infrastructure for the Earth System Sciences (ESS) – is currently building a web-based entry point – called OneStop4All – to serve ESS researchers with access to ESS data, means to process and analyse these, educational ESS material, and more. One core product of the OneStop4All is the NFDI4Earth Living Handbook (LHB). This NFDI4Earth LHB aims to structure and harmonise all information related to research data management and data science approaches in the ESS in a community-driven effort. It allows researchers, societies, funding agencies, companies, authorities, or the interested public to improve their knowledge about ESS research data, how these are best analysed and interpreted as well as managed to ensure their sustainability and reusability for future projects. The LHB has an encyclopedia-style, allowing all ESS community members to provide content on all levels and to all aspects of the LHB collaboratively. This means that, like e.g., for Wikipedia, LHB articles can be added, edited, and curated at any time and by any ESS community member, to make the LHB a living library with up-to-date information that evolves with the needs of the ESS community. 

An editorial board curates the LHB content. This editorial board is open for members and non-members of the NFDI4Earth alike. Its main task is supporting the authors and curating their contributions, as well as developing the NFDI4Earth Living Handbook further by e.g., optimising the editorial process, providing new features, or initiating coordinated contributions on specific topics. 

The LHB content is structured along the research data life cycle through "collections". Collections bundle topically related articles. They can be part of other collections, and articles – as well as collections themselves – can belong to more than one collection. This way, a network-like structure is implemented that allows to structure the sometimes heavily intertwined topics in a more appropriate way than a typical table of contents. In addition, links between articles allow for easy navigation between articles.