Abstract
This work presents a practical case study of the Open Science principles applied to the valorization of a long-term marine dataset collected in the Northern Adriatic Sea, one of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites of the LTER-Italy network. The dataset covers a temporal range of 50 years (1965โ2015), and it is composed of abiotic, and phyto- and zooplankton data, for a total of 21 parameters. The case study involved many actions, which will be described here, distinguishing between the ones affecting the whole research project workflow and those acting more specifically on the dataset. We evaluate strengths, weaknesses, and possible improvements for each action. The present study pointed out that, despite the initial and still some remaining mistrust, opening research projects is more than a best practice. It is (i) important because it improves research transparency (increasing researchersโ credibility, replicability of science, and products reuse), (ii) required by many international initiatives and regulations, and (iii) enriching because it encourages cooperation between scientists across different fields and laboratories.
Highlights
Open Science embraces transparency at all stages of the research process, implying free and open access to research ideas, data, metadata, tools, code, and papers
We report and critically discuss all the necessary steps and actions that we have undertaken for opening the whole research lifecycle, in the process that brought us to giving open access to marine Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) data in the Northern Adriatic Sea (NAS), detailing the lessons learned, the strength and the weaknesses encountered
We wish to emphasize that, since the observations in the dataset were collected starting from the 1960s, planning and data gathering were obviously completed before the introduction of the Open Science concept, and, the Open Science principles were at that time not considered at all
Summary
Open Science embraces transparency at all stages of the research process, implying free and open access to research ideas, data, metadata, tools, code, and papers. The FAIR guiding principles proposed by Wilkinson et al (2016), described how research data should be managed for optimal reuse beyond the data publication process and consist of the following: Opening Marine Long-Term Ecology. Interoperable: data should be available for exploitation and optimized with interoperability with multiple tools and operating systems. This implies using standard data formats; 4. Reusable: they must be widely documented through metadata and the license associated must allow the reuse of the dataset
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