More Than Just DOIs, How to Pragmatically Make 50 Years of Diverse Data
Centre Holdings and Services Citable, The Perspective and Aspirations of
the British Oceanographic Data Centre
Abstract
The British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) celebrated its 50th
anniversary in 2019. It holds data collected from 1773 to the present
day. Holdings are multidisciplinary, heterogeneous data reflecting the
full range of disciplines, platforms, temporal and spatial fieldwork
scales typically encountered in oceanographic research and monitoring.
These collections vary in granularity and contain data which are at
different stages of curation ranging from raw data to standardised data
products. BODC need to improve data services to meet the developing the
expectations of the research community. These include the FAIR data
principles, TRUSTed repository guidelines and CoreTrustSeal
accreditation. This is a significant challenge within the constraints of
resource available (both financial and human). The initial focus for
BODC is making holdings citable with the following aspirations:
Application of DOIs to data at the point of receipt by BODC. Publication
of data papers and publication of DOIs for data products. Application of
persistent identifiers to low level data granules where DOIs are not
feasible. Application of persistent identifiers to datasets included in
BODC API services and versioning of these data. Work with organisations
or groups who include data curated by BODC in their products to enable
the provenance of data to be unambiguous. Work with communities on joint
data papers where BODC are a partner organisation. This will enable each
type of data served by BODC to be unambiguously citable. The initial
effort is being directed towards the application of DOIs to data
submissions and publication of data papers for BODC curated data
products.