Environmental Data Initiative: Repository and Curation Services

Abstract:

The Environmental Data Initiative is an NSF-funded project, actively promoting and enabling curation and re-use of environmental data. Our team consists of highly motivated and experienced data practitioners, software developers, and research scientists. We assist researchers from field stations, individual laboratories, and research projects of all sizes to archive and publish their environmental data in the EDI Data Repository. Our repository grew out of the infrastructure developed by the LTER Network and its design has been informed by 30 years of LTER data management experience. The EDI repository requires that detailed metadata accompany a dataset submission to ensure future reusability of that data. Furthermore, data and metadata must pass extensive congruency checks before being uploaded, ensuring that only high quality metadata and data are archived in the EDI Repository. EDI has developed a user-friendly, web-based metadata editor, ezEML, to make the process of generating metadata accessible to all. To teach scientists to use our system, we also offer one-on-one curation assistance to anyone who requests it and will complete the data publication process ourselves once complete metadata has been submitted. For those wishing to publish data independently of our curation team, we provide ample online guidance and are always just a slack message away. We have also led multiple successful in-person data publishing training workshops to acquaint groups with our resources and are developing an online curriculum so that we can reach more people more efficiently. Datasets published with EDI receive a DOI, making them easily referenced to meet funder and publisher requirements. EDI is committed to enable data that is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR).