Abstract
Data from the Polar Regions are of critical importance to modern research and decision makers. Regardless of their disciplinary and institutional affiliations, researchers rely heavily on the comparison of existing data with new data sets to assess changes that are taking effect. However, in a recent survey of 113 major polar data providers, we found that an estimated 60% of the existing polar research data is unfindable through common search engines and can only be accessed through institutional webpages. This raises an awareness sign of the need of the scientific community to harvest different metadata related to the Polar Regions and collect it in a homogenous, seamless database and making this database available to researchers, students and publics through one search platform.
 This contribution describes the progress in an ongoing project, Open Polar, started in 2019 at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. The project aims to collect metadata about all the open-access research data, articles and other scholarly documents related to the Polar Regions in a homogenous and seamless database. During the first six months of the project, the beta version of the user-interface was established, with a search by map and an advanced search function. An extensive geo-database that includes thousands of polar locations and their geographic information was collected from different sources. The geo-database together with a list of keywords (i.e. on sources, indigenous peoples, languages and other polar-related keywords) will be used in the filtration process.
 A Reference Board was formed, and the first board meeting took place in April 2020. The geographic definition of “Polar Regions” was defined in order to include most of the current geographic definitions of “Arctic”. The project is still facing some challenges that include for example integration with non-standard data sources who do not use Dublin Core Metadata schema, or are not harvestable through the Open Access Initiative’s standard protocol for harvesting (OAI-PMH).
Highlights
The Polar Regions are places where global processes interact across the Earth and these regions are considered as barometers to measure the health of the Earth, and as key areas to study the global changes in the Earth’s ecosystem (e.g. IPCC, 2007, 2013; Beck et al, 2014)
A study by Johnson et al (2019) on the Arctic region showed that social sciences and indigenous studies have a findability gap around 84%
This findability gap is not connected only to the Polar Regions, but similar gaps can be observed on different research disciplines covering different geographic locations
Summary
The Polar Regions (i.e. the Arctic and Antarctic) are places where global processes interact across the Earth and these regions are considered as barometers to measure the health of the Earth, and as key areas to study the global changes in the Earth’s ecosystem (e.g. IPCC, 2007, 2013; Beck et al, 2014). Several recent climate impact assessments on the ecosystem of the Polar Regions (e.g. AMAP, 2011, Forbes, 2011, Turner et al, 2009, 2013, Arctic Council, 2013, Krupnik et al, 2011) draw a consistent pattern of climatedriven environmental, societal, and economic changes in recent decades These assessments rely heavily on the comparison of existing data with new data sets to assess changes that are taking effect. The project aims to collect metadata about all the open-access research data and documents related to the Polar Regions in a homogenous and seamless database and making this global output of open-access material available through an interactive user interface. The project will help to make research data and documents considered to be of relevance to the polar regions more visible and searchable to the end-users and as a result reducing the findability gap. New services that aim at making research data and documents more visible and searchable are needed
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
