Connecting Researchers to Data Repositories in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences

Abstract

The Repository Finder tool was developed to help researchers in the domain of Earth, space, and environmental sciences to identify appropriate repositories where they can deposit their research data and to promote practices that implement the FAIR Principles, encouraging progress toward sharing data that are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. Requirements for the design of the tool were gathered through a series of workshops and working groups as a part of the Enabling FAIR Data initiative led by the American Geophysical Union that included the development of a decision tree that researchers may follow in selecting a data repository, interviews with domain repository managers, and usability testing. The tool is hosted on the web by DataCite and enables a researcher to query all data repositories by keyword or to view a list of domain repositories that accept data for deposit, support open access, and provide persistent identifiers. Metadata records from the re3data.org registry of research data repositories and the returned results highlight repositories that have achieved trustworthy digital repository certification through a formal procedure such as the CoreTrust Seal.