SciX: Scaling Research Discovery and Collaboration Across Earth andSpace Science Infrastructures

Earth and space scientists increasingly work across disciplinary, institutional, and national boundaries, drawing on diverse data sources, tools, and communities. While research data infrastructures (RDIs) have made significant progress in enabling access to data, researchers still face fragmentation across platforms, uneven user experiences, and barriers to interdisciplinary discovery and collaboration.

SciX is NASA’s evolving research discovery and collaboration platform, building on the long-established success of the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) to serve the full breadth of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. In this contribution, we describe SciX as a user-centred research infrastructure that connects people, research outputs, funding opportunities, and Open Science resources across Earth, planetary, heliophysics, and astrophysics communities. Rather than replacing domain-specific data centres, SciX aims to complement existing infrastructures by improving discoverability, interoperability at the metadata and knowledge level, and cross-disciplinary navigation of the research landscape.

We reflect on the opportunities and challenges of scaling an infrastructure with a strong disciplinary identity (ADS) into a broader, transdisciplinary platform. This includes balancing community-specific needs with shared services, supporting FAIR and Open Science practices in ways that are meaningful to researchers, and fostering cultural change through community engagement rather than top-down mandates. Drawing on early use cases and community feedback, we discuss how SciX is addressing user needs, sustainability, and governance while enabling new forms of interdisciplinary connection.

We conclude by outlining lessons learned for the design of sustainable RDIs and invite dialogue with the Earth System Science community on how infrastructures like SciX can better support collaborative, open, and societally relevant research across domains.