Navigating the Open Data landscape

Ecology & evolution may be latecomers to the Open Science party, but there are enough openly available data by now to be positively daunting. And those data are scattered around many different repositories. NIOO's Antica Culina and a team of ecologists, data specialists and librarians are helping researchers find their way.

In a new blog on the Springer Nature's Research Data website, Antica Culina admits being a fairly recent convert to Open Science and Open Data herself.

After starting a DPhil in Oxford in 2010, she found that many of the original studies she was using to support her research were no longer available once the results had been published. "What a loss to science and human knowledge!"

Open Science aims to preserve original data in a form suitable for reuse by future researchers: a 'new era of science', according to Culina in another blog. But once her own eyes had been opened, she found that her field - ecology and evolution - was still lagging behind. And especially what she calls the "long tail of ecological research": many individual projects producing small-scale data.

Scattered landscape

That doesn't mean data aren't available. On the contrary, writes Culina: "I was curious to see how much Open Data is there in my fields (ecology and evolution) - spoiler: a lot." But "ecological and evolutionary data are scattered across a large number of community specific and general repositories at present."

In a recent Perspectives-article in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Culina and a team that comprises data specialists, NIOO-ecologists and one of NIOO's librarians describe "diving in" and trying to navigate this "unfolding landscape" with the aim of making it more approachable. "I love this project", Culina writes in her Springer Nature blog.

"Not only as I believe it will be of a great use to researchers, but also as it was a collaboration between ecologists (Marcel E. Visser, Tom Crowther, me), developers of Open Science platforms and services (Paolo Manghi, Miriam Baglioni), and a librarian (Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer); I strongly believe that these multi-disciplinary efforts are the future of science."

Community-driven

The result is a practical list of platforms that researchers can use to search for EcoEvo data. "This is equivalent to when you use Web of Science to search for papers across many different journals", writes Culina. "These platforms search for datasets across many different data repositories."

Useful platforms come in different shapes and sizes - the list includes actual repositories, data aggregators, virtual research environments and more - but a common denominator is that they all make it possible to search "through one interface, thus increasing search speed, efficiency and coverage."

In addition, the Perspectives-article invites researchers to add more resources to the list and describe their experiences with them. "Because the data landscape is very dynamic, we would like that this platform becomes community driven."

Identifying patterns

As the focus in ecology and evolution lies increasingly on identifying broader patterns and processes across species, space and time, Open Science and Open Data are only going to be more important. Culina's own research - into the stability of bird relations - clearly demonstrates this.

At NIOO, Culina is no longer the "complete outsider" she says she was only a few years ago. She's working as a fully-fledged Open Data specialist and advocate in her field whose 2017 symposium on open science tools, data & technologies has proved to be something of a landmark in the field.

Her advice: "Be excited to be in a generation that is a part of a big change. It is challenging, but it is so rewarding!"

• 'Perspective: Navigating the unfolding open data landscape in ecology and evolution', Antica Culina, Miriam Baglioni, Tom W. Crowther, Marcel E. Visser, Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer & Paolo Manghi, Nature Ecology & Evolution Vol. 2 (2018), doi:10.1038/s41559-017-0458-2