In ESS, researchers tackle critical questions that have significant implications for society. Addressing these complex issues often requires access, integration, and analysis of data across scales and disciplinary boundaries. To achieve this, researchers need sustainable support in data management and collaborative analysis throughout the entire data lifecycle. Research data infrastructures (RDIs) can provide sharing and management of research products in a systematic way to enable interoperable research. Through their offerings and services, they can shape research practices and are strongly connected with the communities of users who identify and associate themselves with them. For this, fostering FAIRness and openness, e.g. by applying established standards for metadata, data, and/or scientific workflows, and implementing innovative concepts such as FAIR Digital Objects (FDO) to ensure that data can be reused by both humans and machines across different platforms and disciplines, is crucial.
Even though it is clear that RDIs are indispensable for solving big societal problems, their wide adoption requires a cultural change within research communities. At the same time, RDIs themselves must be developed further to serve generic and domain specific user applications. The sustainability of RDIs must be improved, international cooperation must be increased, and duplication of development efforts must be avoided. To be able to provide a community of diverse career stages and backgrounds with a convincing infrastructure that is established beyond national and institutional boundaries, new collaboration patterns and funding approaches must be tested so that RDIs foster cultural change in academia and be a reliable foundation for FAIR and open research.
This session provides a forum and welcomes contributions about:
- user stories, use cases, storylines, that show how and why using data across scales and disciplines is important.
- innovative infrastructure concepts on all scales, ranging from regional to international
- findings on user needs and methods or concepts to develop high-quality user interfaces, such as portals
- solutions that demonstrate building blocks/components for specific research infrastructures, e.g., tackling interoperability challenges
- approaches to provide or reuse sustainable software solutions
- ideas to enable cultural change and international collaboration