Community Building for Data Sharing and Open Science within the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences

Focuses on open science practices in suicide research. Specifically, the authors use examples from their own and others' work to demonstrate the opportunities for future-proofing research by implementing open science practices, and they discuss some of the challenges and their potential solutions. They cover implementing open science practices in new, ongoing, and concluded studies, and discuss practices in order of being 'low' to 'high' threshold to implement (based on Kathawalla et al., 2021). Space constraints preclude an extensive presentation of all open science practices although they briefly describe the strategies of providing preprints, sharing study materials and codes, preregistration of studies and registered reports, and sharing research data. To highlight the open science work of as many researchers as possible, examples are provided in Electronic Supplementary Material 1 (ESM 1) rather than in the text. The authors ask for readers' help in adding to these examples via their 'living' reading list (https://osf.io/v6y3t/).

‘Open science’ is a term that remains under constant discussion. Based on 29 semi-structured interviews with researchers from the natural sciences working in Brazil, France and Peru, this paper discusses the different meanings and values associated with open science. The different imaginaries concerning open science can be organized into three main categories: open science as research outputs, as embedded in the research process, and as related to the science–society relationship, the latter being more common in the two South American countries in this study. Openness, freedom and democracy are values commonly associated with this concept. In addition, Mertonian values such as universalism and organized skepticism are highlighted, although with nuanced variations due to open science practices.

Here we synthesise the results of three participatory workshops to explore sustainable development priorities in eastern Africa, and discuss these in the context of Earth and environmental science. The planet is a core pillar of sustainable development, and the engagement of Earth and environmental scientists is vital to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In 2017, the British Geological Survey gathered 76 delegates from 48 organisations at three workshops in Nairobi (Kenya), Lusaka (Zambia), and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). Using the SDGs as a reference tool, participants (i) identified development priorities at regional (eastern Africa) and national scales, (ii) explored the Earth and environmental science research and data needs to help address these, and (iii) co-designed relevant science-for-development projects. Participants identified sustainable development priorities to be basic (or immediate) needs, including zero hunger (SDG 2), education (SDG 4), ending poverty (SDG 1), and water and sanitation (SDG 6). Participants also described examples of Earth and environmental science research, training, technologies, monitoring and management to support sustainable development. Emerging themes included environmental data (collection, management, integration, access), policy and regulations (integrating environmental science, and policy coherence), resource management (degradation, pollution and environmental protection), and scientific education and understanding (training, knowledge exchange, public understanding of science). A comparative synthesis of existing regional and national development strategies indicates that current narratives of development interventions do not fully capture the opportunities from environmental data integration and policy coherence. Greater engagement with and by the Earth and environmental science community could help to advance these themes to support sustainable development in eastern Africa. This would support efforts to reduce environmental degradation, improve natural resource management, and inform the utilisation of natural resources to improve economic growth and social wellbeing.

In the dynamic landscape of Earth Science research, the promotion of open science principles is paramount for advancing knowledge and collaboration. The Earthdata Forum is an actively maintained and operational user forum for all participating National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs), and the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD). The Forum serves as a cross-DAAC platform from which user communities can obtain authoritative information relating to NASA Earth Science. This abstract explores the role of the Earthdata Forum forum.earthdata.nasa.gov as a pivotal platform in fostering open science within the Earth Science community. The platform serves as a hub for researchers to actively engage in discussions, share datasets, and collaboratively tackle challenges in the field.   Key aspects discussed include the platform's contribution to data accessibility, collaboration, and knowledge sharing. Forum.earthdata.nasa.gov provides a space where researchers transparently ask questions, discuss methodologies, share insights, and seek advice from a vibrant community. The resulting collaborative environment not only facilitates the exchange of ideas but also bolsters the collective knowledge base.   The abstract also delves into the significance of community engagement within the platform, emphasizing how active participation contributes to the ethos of open science. Furthermore, discussions on open-source tools, policy considerations, and the sharing of educational resources underscore the multifaceted role of forum.earthdata.nasa.gov in advancing open science principles.   As we navigate the evolving landscape of Earth Science research, understanding the impact of platforms like the Earthdata Forum on promoting transparency, accessibility, and collaboration becomes crucial. This abstract provides insights into the platform's role in nurturing an open science culture and its implications for the broader scientific community.  

Embracing Open Science is critical if we are to make science more collaborative, reproducible, transparent and impactful. Open Science undoubtedly has the power to positively influence society, but its implementation is not yet universal. A revolution is required: one which opens up research processes and changes mindsets in favour of a world where policies, tools and infrastructures universally support the growth and sharing of knowledge. Research libraries are well placed to make that revolution happen, and LIBER's Open Science Roadmap outlines the specific actions libraries can take to champion Open Science, both within and beyond their own institutions. As we explain in detail throughout this document, libraries need to advocate for Open Science locally and internationally, to support Open Science through tools and services and to expand the impact of their work through collaboration and partnerships. LIBER has shaped its 2018-2022 Strategy to support and enable Open Science and it is our hope that this Roadmap will help Europe’s research libraries to do the same. This document was written during spring 2018, when the Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP) produced integrated advice for the EC and key stakeholders. People from across the LIBER community translated the OSPP recommendations for libraries and combined them with suggestions drawn from their own expertise and experiences.

This paper presents the specific process used by members of the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Semantic Harmonization Cluster, to harmonize cryospheric terms gathered by the Global Cryosphere Watch (GCW) with two leading semantic resources used in the Earth and Environmental science communities—the Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET) and the Environment Ontology (ENVO). This process led to updates to both ENVO and SWEET as well as the development of an alignment file relating cryospheric terms in ENVO to those in SWEET. In addition, we summarize several leading practices which may be applied to other projects/realms within Earth and Environmental science and perhaps beyond, as well as suggest a generalized process for doing so. This paper describes the history of the effort, the technical and decision-making processes used to resolve differences between semantic resources, and describes several issues encountered, with a focus on those that were addressed during the effort. Lessons learned, examples of the problems encountered and a summary of resulting leading practices growing out of this work is provided.

The Open Science and Innovation Vision included in ESA’s EO Science Strategy (2024) addresses 8 key elements: 1) openness of research data, 2) open-source scientific code, 3) open access papers with data and code; 4) standards-based publication and discovery of scientific experiments, 5) scientific workflows reproducible on various infrastructures, 6) access to education on open science, 7) community practice of open science; and 8) EO business models built on open-source. EarthCODE (https://earthcode.esa.int) is a strategic ESA EO initiative to support the implementation of this vision. EarthCODE (Earth Science Collaborative Open Development Environment) will form part of the next generation of cloud-based geospatial services, aiming towards an integrated, cloud-based, user-centric development environment for European Space Agency’s (ESA) Earth science activities. EarthCODE looks to maximise long-term visibility, reuse and reproducibility of the research outputs of such projects, by leveraging FAIR and open science principles and enabling, thus fostering a sustainable scientific process. EarthCODE proposes a flexible and scalable architecture developed with interoperable open-source blocks, with a long-term vision evolving by incrementally integrating industrially provided services from a portfolio of the Network of Resources.  Additionally, EarthCODE is a utilisation domain of EOEPCA+, contributing to the development and evolution of Open Standards and protocols, enabling internationally interoperable solutions.  EarthCODE will provide an Integrated Development Platform, giving developers tools needed to develop high quality workflows, allowing experiments to be executed in the cloud and be end-to-end reproduced by other scientists. EarthCODE is built around existing open-source solutions, building blocks and platforms, such as the Open Science Catalogue, EOxHub and EOEPCA. It has additionally begun to integrate platform services from DeepESDL, Euro Data Cube, Polar TEP and the openEO federation on CDSE platforms, with more being added annually through ESA best practices. With it’s adopted federated approach, EarthCODE will facilitate processing on other platforms, i.e. DeepESDL, ESA EURO Data Cube, Open EO Cloud/Open EO Platform and AIOPEN/AI4DTE.   The roadmap for the portal includes the initial portal release by end of 2024, followed by the capability to publish experiments in Q1 2025 (including development, publishing, finding and related community engagement), and by mid-2025 to have a further release with reproducibility capabilities around accessibility and execute functionalities.  Collaboration and Federation are at the heart of EarthCODE. As EarthCODE evolves we expect providing solutions allowing federation of data and processing. EarthCODE has ambition to deliver a model for a Collaborative Open Development Environment for Earth system science, where researchers can leverage the power of the wide range of EO platform services available to conduct their science, while also making use of FAIR Open Science tools to manage data, code and documentation, create end-to-end reproducible workflows on platforms, and have the opportunity to discover, use, reuse, modify and build upon the research of others in a fair and safe way. Overall, EarthCODE aims to enable elements for EO Open Science and Innovation vision, including open data, open-source code, linked data/code, open-access documentation, end-to-end reproducible workflows, open-science resources, open-science tools, and a healthy community applying all the elements in their practice.

In most places on the planet vegetation thrives: it is known as “greening Earth”. However in certain regions, especially in the Arctic, there are areas exhibiting a browning trend. This phenomenon is well known but not fully understood yet, and grasping its impact on local ecosystems requires involvement of scientists from different disciplines, including social sciences and humanities, as well as local populations. Here we focus on the Troms and Finnmark counties in northern Norway to assess the extent of the problem and any link with local environmental conditions as well as potential impacts. We have chosen to adopt an open and collaborative process and take advantage of the services offered by RELIANCE on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). RELIANCE delivers a suite of innovative and interconnected services that extend the capabilities of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to support the management of the research lifecycle within Earth Science Communities and Copernicus Users. The RELIANCE project has delivered 3 complementary  technologies: Research Objects (ROs), Data Cubes and AI-based Text Mining. RoHub is a Research Object management platform that implements these 3 technologies and enables researchers to collaboratively manage, share and preserve their research work. We will show how we are using these technologies along with EGI notebooks to work open and share an executable Jupyter Notebook that is fully reproducible and reusable. We use a number of Python libraries from the Pangeo software stack such as Xarray, Dask and Zarr. Our Jupyter Notebook is bundled with its computational environment, datacubes and related bibliographic resources in an executable Research Object. We believe that this approach can significantly speed up the research process and can drive it to more exploitable results. Up to now, we have used indices derived from satellite data (in particular Sentinel-2) to assess how the vegetation cover in Troms and Finnmark counties has changed. To go a bit further we are investigating how to relate such information to relevant local parameters obtained from meteorological reanalysis data (ERA5 and ERA5-land from ECMWF). That should give a good basis for training an Artificial Intelligence algorithm and testing it, with the objective of getting an idea about the possibility of “predicting” what is likely to happen in the near future with certain types of vegetation like mosses and lichens which are essential for local populations and animals.

Libraries are a leading actor developing the discussion about Open Science in the Russian scientific field in the competition between them, publishers, repositories and scientific institutes. Understanding the vision of the role of libraries in Open Science will help determine the contours of the possible implementation of the concept in Russia. Based on an analysis of the range of relevant sources, the author describes the transformation of the role of libraries in the conditions of Open Science based on the reconstruction of their ideas. To achieve this goal, the article performs a number of tasks, including: identifying the context for the formation of ideas about the role of libraries, identifying the prerequisites for changing the role of libraries, identifying the old and new roles of libraries in Open Science, identifying barriers to the implementation of the new role of libraries in Open Science. It is noted that the interest in Open Science on the part of Russian libraries occurs in accordance with global trends. Open Science for libraries is presented in the Russian scientific field as a challenge caused by the increasingly complex scientific environment. Such challenges encourage libraries to redefine their place in the information ecosystem of the future, and Open Science is a key aspect on the basis of which libraries build their strategic development. The active role of libraries in the development of Open Science is due to synergetic factors. However, the author also notes the observed forced nature of libraries’ participation in the development of Open Science. The author comes to the conclusion that the leadership of libraries in the discussion regarding Open Science in the Russian scientific field is due to more than just competition for the possession of a resource, but has an existential character against the background of the risks of libraries being ousted from the process of scientific communication.

Globally, the open science movement has as its main principle the openness of publicly funded data and research outputs. It is essential that actors in this movement include the development and implementation of legal, technical and technological infrastructure. The premise of this research was that if the purpose of open science is free access to research products, then technological infrastructure is fundamental to crystallise availability, visibility, reproducibility and unrestricted access. The research aimed to identify actions of the open science movement in Latin America and study technological infrastructure for data repositories developed and implemented there. The methodology comprised a bibliographic review and quantitative methods. For the exploratory analysis, the sources for retrieval of information were official Web portals of library entities, the Registry of Research Data Repositories, and the Dataverse Project. The search was based on defined variables, namely actions, data repository, infrastructure, library collaboration, and repositories in the Registry of Research Data Repositories and Dataverse. Findings were studied through a descriptive content analysis based on defined variables. We found that nine Latin American countries carry out open science actions; eight develop research data repositories; eight implement technological infrastructure to develop repositories; seven collaborate with libraries in open science actions; and seven have their repositories recorded in the Registry of Research Data Repositories and Dataverse, resulting in 62 research data repositories in Latin America. We concluded that these libraries are actors and laboratories with methodological and pragmatic elements that contribute to the organisation, reproducibility, transparency, management and open access that support the paradigm shift which the scholarly communication system requires.

As a new paradigm of global scientific and technological innovation, open science has attracted widespread attention from the scientific community and society. Reviewing the current research progress and exploring open science in practice can promote the development of this field and provide experience for future research. Through the literature survey, the concept and connotation, development motivation and practical significance of open science are summarized, and the main research viewpoints are analyzed from three aspects: open access, open data and open infrastructure. At present, some issues in the existing research have been extensively discussed, including concepts, historical evolutions, characteristic advantages, driving force, influence, challenges, practices, policies of open science, which have significantly promoted the theoretical research and practical development of open science. In the future, it is suggested to deepen the systematic study of open science policy system, strengthen the research of open science practice and development path, as well as perfect open science practice in the whole process of scientific research.

Supplementary material 5 from: Mietchen D, Penev L, Georgiev T, Ovcharova B, Kostadinova I (2021) Open science in practice: 300 published research ideas and outcomes illustrate how RIO Journal facilitates engagement with the research process. Research Ideas and Outcomes 7: e68595. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.7.e68595

Figure 3 A collection in RIO - for example for a topic, an event or a project - may include a diverse range of both traditional and unconventional research outputs, as well as links to publications from elsewhere (for details, see What can I publish on the RIO website).

The purpose of this study was to study online tools to support open science research processes, as a result of which a system of open tools to support scientific research (OIPSR) was built at the State Public Scientific and Technical Library of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences on the online platform “Library for Open Science”. To create a system, an analysis of existing open tools to support research processes was carried out. Online tools have been identified from a number of different sources. The tools were evaluated in terms of openness, freeness and accessibility under restrictions. The final list of open research support tools contains 137 tools. As a result, a system was created based on the stages of the entire cycle of scientific research – planning, searching, analyzing, writing, publishing, disseminating, evaluating. The found and selected tools were grouped according to research activities for all stages of scientific research. The developed system will allow scientific researchers to increase the efficiency of their scientific work, reduce the time to search for the necessary publications and data, make research workflows more open and reliable, which will contribute to the promotion of open science practices in our country.

Open science is one of the major ways to combat the reproducibility crisis plaguing many areas of research, from biomedical research to psychology and data science. Despite growing interest and increasing mandates to make research outputs openly available and to facilitate collaboration through open data and research tools, barriers exist that prevent the broader adoption of open science. Lack of incentives, metrics, and an open culture persist as main roadblocks to the adoption of open science practices. Universities' libraries are playing increasingly important roles in open science adoption by providing training, resources, and expertise. However, one of the challenges many libraries face is the ability to connect and collaborate with the research community. Facing this challenge, three liaison librarians at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) teamed up with faculty in Biological Sciences, thanks to the embedded liaison model at CMU. Together, we obtained a joint grant from the DSF Charitable Foundation (through the Mellon College of Science) to host a transdisciplinary Open Science Symposium on Oct 18-19, 2018. Comprised of a series of presentations, panel discussion, hands-on workshops and a scientific speed dating event, this symposium stimulated discussions about opportunities and challenges in open science practices, accelerated the adoption of open research tools, and built community and collaborations in life sciences and related disciplines. We expected this event to be well-attended and highly interactive. In the first two weeks after the registration opened, an impressive response was received from CMU and nearby universities, with more than 75% or registrations being graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty. As deliverables of the symposium, we will publish a conference report summarizing discussions at the symposium, make a set of recommendations for advancing open science at CMU, and make plans to host a future event to reach a broader set of disciplines.This conference report was presented at the Coalition of Networked Information (CNI) Fall meeting, Washington DC, 10 December 2018.