GRIIDC – Coastal and Marine Science Data Repository: Making Texas OneGulf Data Available through FAIR Data Principles

Data produced by scientific research are often lost when not managed properly or not made publicly available in an archive. The consequences of data loss such as preventing scientific discovery, costing money and resources, and duplicating efforts, are too great to ignore. Data archiving should occur shortly after a research project is completed so metadata and interpretive information is not lost.

Preserving and making data available from Texas OneGulf funded projects will support both topic areas as data stored in an archive can be used in the future to understand long-term coastal ecosystem structure and the effects of environment to human health. Public data can be used by anyone to build upon research, create policy, support conservation efforts, identify data gaps, and perform synthesis work.

The goal of this project is to make data produced by Texas OneGulf funded projects publicly available through the GRIIDC website in a timely manner.

The following objectives will be accomplished through this project.

• Researchers will learn about data management best practices, data submission, and propercitation techniques through training.

• Researchers will plan for data submission by submitting dataset information forms (DIF).

• Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) will be issued for datasets.

• Datasets will be linked with associated publications.

• Descriptive metadata will be created for each dataset.

• Data will be stored and backed up.

• Data will be made available through a dataset landing page.

• Data will be discoverable through the GRIIDC search page, Google dataset search, and DataONE.
Making the data open to end users such as researchers and Texas decision makers assists with policy and management. Texas OneGulf researchers also benefit from transparency about research findings, enhancing the quality of science.