New platforms and techniques for strengthening ties between observations and user communities

Over the past couple of years research data stewardship platforms and tools have grown substantially. Yet when we say "grown" it may not be quite in the way one might think. Instead of growing larger as a unit, a measurement of growth here is in a systems ability to connect and the perception of relevance and utility of that system to the user communities. In this session we propose to introduce several platforms and initiatives within the research data management realm that exhibit this enhanced capacity to connect with the user on their terms. These platforms are unique in their missions yet they also connect with one another in ways that advance the overall utility for the user. We would like to get a larger picture of the current work of several of these entities, their common threads, and the specific projects with which they are engaged. We are honored to have the following speakers present: Josh Nicholson with Authorea - a document editor that allows researchers to write, cite, collaborate, host data and publish content online. Laurel Haak with OrcID - a nonprofit organization whose service provides a unique identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. John Kunze with EZID - a service conceived, built, and maintained by the California Digital Library to create and manage globally unique IDs for data and other sources. Amy Krichhoff with Portico - a large, international digital preservation service designed by the non-profit group ITHAKA to facilitate the academic community's use of digital technologies and sustainable preservation of the scholarly record. Karen Hanson with RMap - a project to develop mechanisms to preserve the many-to-many complex relationships among scholarly publications and their underlying data, thereby supporting the continual development of scholarly communication and digital publishing. (This will be an update from the winter session.) Mercè Crosas with Dataverse - an open source project developed at Harvard, Dataverse is a research repository software package that allows its users to share, preserve, cite, explore, and analyze research data via an online web application. By leveraging the ways these entities work together in the user's favor, this in turn helps to solve the issue of too many disparate and unsustainable singular operations. As Simon Porter (2016) notes, system boundaries are disappearing and in its place emerges a "new research information citizenship" - one based on a network of contributors not confined to one specific system. Looking at these groups we can begin to see this emerging. The platforms and their utilities are of interest to ESIP members on several different levels. They represent some of the latest work in user-centered research data platforms and they also focus on openness, transparency, and ways to foster connections among different stakeholders and data user groups. In turn ESIP provides a unique venue for these platforms to explore new ways to work with the communities most engaged in working with multiple types of earth science data. The session will conclude with a discussion of gaps and the path forward. Science, Digital; Porter, Simon (2016): Digital Science White Paper: A New ‘Research Data Mechanics’. figshare.https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3514859.v1 Retrieved: 16 56, Oct 27, 2016 (GMT)