Abstract
The GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences is the national laboratory for Geosciences in Germany. As part of the Helmholtz Association, providing and maintaining large-scale scientific infrastructures are an essential part of GFZ activities. This includes the generation of significant volumes and numbers of research data, which subsequently become source materials for data publications. The development and maintenance of data systems is a key component of GFZ Data Services to support state-of-the-art research. A challenge lies not only in the diversity of scientific subjects and communities, but also in different types and manifestations of how data are managed by research groups and individual scientists. The data repository of GFZ Data Services provides a flexible IT infrastructure for data storage and publication, including minting of digital object identifiers (DOI). It was built as a modular system of several independent software components linked together through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provided by the eSciDoc framework. Principal application software are panMetaDocs for data management and DOIDB for logging and moderating data publications activities. Wherever possible, existing software solutions were integrated or adapted. A summary of our experiences made in operating this service is given. Data are described through comprehensive landing pages and supplementary documents, like journal articles or data reports, thus augmenting the scientific usability of the service.
Highlights
The free and open access to research data has been identified as a key issue by the scientific community, by research agencies and governments (e.g., Berlin Declaration, G8 Science Ministers Statement, EU Implementation of the G8 Open Data Charter, Digital Agenda of the Federal Government of Germany [1,2,3,4])
Its Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) registration service for data publications received a number of technical updates, one of them being the metadata store and DOI minting service
In addition to the DOI registration, the Metadata Store (MDS) has a component for searching datasets by metadata attributes and it provides a component for the dissemination of its metadata catalogue through an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) interface
Summary
The free and open access to research data has been identified as a key issue by the scientific community, by research agencies and governments (e.g., Berlin Declaration, G8 Science Ministers Statement, EU Implementation of the G8 Open Data Charter, Digital Agenda of the Federal Government of Germany [1,2,3,4]). To provide a format for extensive description of independently published datasets, GFZ Data Services launched a data report series in 2011 As this limits access to the system to GFZ employees, we describe our solutions to expose datasets to external reviewers and ways to collect metadata from external scientists later in this article. To prevent scientists from using the DOI before its registration, the preview page contains a note that the dataset is currently under review
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