FID GEO: Promoting Open Science in the Geosciences

Abstract

The rise of Open Science practices is impacting the entire scientific publishing culture. The transition to Open Access for text publications goes hand in hand with the growing demand to make scientific data and software available to the general public. The FAIR data principles play a key role in this, designed to make research and the underlying data easily findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable for humans and machines. Geosciences data are as diverse as their content. They range from large real-time data streams of international observing networks to small data sets produced by individual researchers at their laboratories. Consequently, there need to be different strategies for data management and publication in which research data repositories can be important partners for the researchers. The Specialised Information Service for Geoscience (FID GEO) is a DFG-funded project that is promoting a holistic approach of Open Science that includes scholarly literature, data, samples, and scientific software equally and pushes for their interlinkage. FID GEO has become an important player for connecting researchers, data repositories, information infrastructures, German geoscientific societies, and publishers. FID GEO actively provides data and text publishing services through its affiliated repositories GFZ Data Services and GEO-LEOe-docs, as well as on-demand digitization of printed geoscience literature and maps. In addition, FID GEO aims to inform the German-based geoscience community about all aspects of Open Science and FAIR data by bringing the discussions to the individual disciplines through various communication channels.