Repository Cross-Linking for Open Archiving and Sharing of Scientific Data and Articles

The open availability and wide accessibility of scientific articles, data sets, and other digital resources is becoming the norm for 21st century science. Growing numbers of repositories of scientific resources enable researchers to discover, understand, and build upon previous work at greater scales than was previously possible. Many interrelationships exist between research articles, data, software, and other services used to produce scientific findings. Repositories for these resources, however, typically only support one particular kind of resource, or at most support a couple of resource types, such as data and software. This has led to the siloing of information in a vast number of repositories. Producers and users of scientific resources would benefit from repositories working together at a technical and process level to provide greater services than any one repository can provide.

This presentation will outline a model for how multiple repositories of diverse resources can exchange and connect related information via complementary workflows and metadata sharing. This project is producing a pilot implementation of repository cross-linking, using two repositories provided and managed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) as the development bed: 1) the OpenSky repository, managed by the NCAR Library, which hosts and provides access to the record of scholarship produced by UCAR and NCAR staff, and 2) is the Earth System Grid (ESG), managed by the NCAR Computational & Information Systems Lab, which provides infrastructure for the distribution and access of climate models, data, and software. Building connections between these repositories will increase public access to geoscience information and data by increasing the visibility of data and information across previously unconnected systems. The goals of this project are to increase discoverability and utility of data through explicitly linking data to important documentation.