Stewardship and sharing of research data matter. They matter at an increasing pace: funding agencies and journals now require data to be publicly available. Even more importantly, open data foster an open inclusive research environment and inspire new lines of scientific inquiry. The Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network has always been at the forefront in open ecological research and accessible data. Leveraging information management expertise in the network, we developed a data inventory model that is designed toward ecological and environmental research.
Results/Conclusions
"LTER-core-metabase" features include: efficient information reuse, easy updates, checks and controlled vocabularies to ensure high quality data publications, integration with emerging standards in open research such as researcher tracking via ORCIDs and semantic annotations to improve data discover-ability. Export to the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) standard is quick and easy, supporting seamless data archival and publication at data repositories, in compliance with community best practices, as well as "FAIR" standards.
Long-term projects, field stations, and research sites are well placed to take advantage of this resource to manage their collections of data, create online data catalogs, and/or report on their data holdings. Established projects can import their existing EML metadata corpus. The schema plus associated tools are open source, well documented, community maintained, and available publicly. Here we describe the inventory design, give example use cases in the LTER network, and provide a guide to how to get started with your data.