iPlaces: Operationalizing FAIR and CARE Data Principles in coastal communities worldwide

Marine Stations advance our understanding of the physical, biogeochemical, ecological, social, and economic interactions that constitute coastal places. Open Science now has sophisticated cyberinfrastructure, and progress is being made toward a Digital Twin Ocean, yet many local communities still feel disconnected from scientific information and its benefits. Scientific metadata describing samples/data from marine stations - as well as the legal and social metadata that are vital for their fair (re)use - are too often stripped or lost as value is added in downstream applications. A self-publishing platform (iPlaces) is proposed to address this “contextual collapse.” Taking advantage of the project application procedures that many stations already have, marine stations can use the iPlaces platform to publish project descriptions and related documentation in their station-branded journal. Using the familiar peer review process, station directors act as editors in a collaborative ecosystem that leverages open scientific data services (exploiting FAIR data principles) while empowering local and Indigenous communities to enter a dialogue with research teams (operationalizing CARE data principles). Benefits flow up and down value chains as: (1) place-based metadata are systematically layered onto research projects, (2) global open science infrastructure automatically applies this metadata to downstream research outputs, and (3) iPlaces “data trust” services link these outputs back to the station and its local community. With the link between the place and the downstream data, the contributions of worldwide marine stations are more visible, ethical, locally connected, and globally networked.