Is this Community in Denial of Reality?

Abstract

As one of the founders and initially chief editor of Earth System Science Data (ESSD), the author is reporting (1) incidents with the availability of DOIed datasets and (2) trends in the usage of publicly built and maintained data infrastructure vs. analysis employing a commercial heavyweight. Both observations are considered sufficiently serious that the author wonders why the underlying facts and realities are not discussed widely in this community. 1) The most cited dataset published through ESSD is the series of yearly reports on the Global Carbon Budget, e.g. the latest, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-5301-2023. These articles routinely inform the United Nations climate change conferences (COPs) and are cited in scientific publications by the hundreds of times. The first datasets of the series were held and provided DOIs by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), which was hosted by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. When CDIAC was shut down in 2017, the datasets were transferred to a repository at another US National Lab, loosing most of the metadata in the process, most notably authorship. Thankfully, hosting of the dataset series has been taken over by the Integrated Carbon Observing System (ICOS) and DOIs to all elements of the series resolve to it. Still, one could argue that the most reliable holder of metainformation about it are not the repositories but ESSD, operated by commercial publisher.  2) ESSD has seen a rapid increase of the number of articles published per year. On top of that, in the last 5 years the share of articles based on analysis performed on Google Earth Engine (GEE) as a platform and the (satellite) data held there, has grown from minor to roughly 15%. This speaks to GEE providing a more helpful service to Earth Science researchers than any other platform, yet no one in the "data community" seems to be interested in discussing the merits of GEE vs., e.g. the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) or other federated infrastructure.  Both these and some other observations – which will be discussed - create the uncomfortable impression that the huge efforts of this community wrt. the FAIRness of data and in the creation of a multitude of publicly funded infrastructure elements, which allegedly will be federated soon, are in denial of reality. (Parts of this work have been presented before, at a pre-conference workshop to RDA20, Gothenburg, 2023)