Enabling FAIR Research in Earth Science through Research Objects

• Main Authors: Garcia-Silva, Andres, Gomez-Perez, Jose Manuel, Palma, Raul, Krystek, Marcin, Mantovani, Simone, Foglini, Federica, Grande, Valentina, De Leo, Francesco, Salvi, Stefano, Trasati, Elisa, Romaniello, Vito, Albani, Mirko, Silvagni, Cristiano, Leone, Rosemarie, Marelli, Fulvio, Albani, Sergio, Lazzarini, Michele, Napier, Hazel J, Glaves, Helen M, Aldridge, Timothy, Meertens, Charles, Boler, Fran, Loescher, Henry W, Laney, Christine, Genazzio, Melissa A, Crawl, Daniel, Altintas, Ilkay
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 27-09-2018
• Subjects: Computer Science - Computation and Language; Computer Science - Digital Libraries
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1809.10617

Data-intensive science communities are progressively adopting FAIR practices
that enhance the visibility of scientific breakthroughs and enable reuse. At
the core of this movement, research objects contain and describe scientific
information and resources in a way compliant with the FAIR principles and
sustain the development of key infrastructure and tools. This paper provides an
account of the challenges, experiences and solutions involved in the adoption
of FAIR around research objects over several Earth Science disciplines. During
this journey, our work has been comprehensive, with outcomes including: an
extended research object model adapted to the needs of earth scientists; the
provisioning of digital object identifiers (DOI) to enable persistent
identification and to give due credit to authors; the generation of
content-based, semantically rich, research object metadata through natural
language processing, enhancing visibility and reuse through recommendation
systems and third-party search engines; and various types of checklists that
provide a compact representation of research object quality as a key enabler of
scientific reuse. All these results have been integrated in ROHub, a platform
that provides research object management functionality to a wealth of
applications and interfaces across different scientific communities. To monitor
and quantify the community uptake of research objects, we have defined
indicators and obtained measures via ROHub that are also discussed herein.