The Arctic Data Center (https://arcticdata.io/) is an NSF-funded archive for Arctic scientific data and other related research documents. Operational since March 2016, the Arctic Data Center is a national partnership, led by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California Santa Barbara, in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and the NSF-funded Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE).
The long-term repository allows for the preservation and sharing of data spanning many disciplines from the Arctic, now and into the future. For example, current holdings span oceanography (doi:10.18739/A28K75), terrestrial plant ecology (doi:10.18739/A2DD35), paleo-climate data from ice cores (doi:10.18739/A20306), ethnography (doi:10.18739/A2Z64F), and many other disciplines. Users are able to search for data from the extensive Arctic data collection (including data historically from ACADIS) using filters, such as the name of data creator, year, identifier, taxa, location and keywords, and others. The search interface also provides a map-based overview of the spatial distribution of data sets, which is helpful in locating historical data in specific regions. Authors are able to seamlessly upload and share data from their desktop, contributing associated metadata which undergoes both automated and human-curation before publishing with a Digital Object Identifier so that their data are easily citable. By joining the DataONE federation, Arctic Data Center content is more widely exposed and allows for great preservation options, taking advantage of DataONE’s replication policies to ensure preservation and access to Arctic Data Center content for decades to come.
The Arctic Data Center is one of the largest Member Nodes so far, bringing over 500,000 data objects to the DataONE federation and bringing the total count of publicly readable data objects to over 900, 000.
More information about the Arctic Data Center and other DataONE Member Nodes and their holdings can be found at http://www.dataone.org/current-member-nodes
About DataONE: DataONE enables universal access to data and also aids researchers in fulfilling their need for data management and in providing secure and permanent access to their data. These needs are filled by offering the scientific community a suite of tools and training materials that cover all aspects of the data life-cycle; from data collection to management, analysis and publication.
About the Arctic Data Center: The NSF Arctic Data Center helps the research community reproducibly preserve and discover all products of NSF-funded science in the Arctic, including data, metadata, software, documents, and provenance that link these in a coherent knowledge model. Key to the initiative is the partnership between NCEAS at UC Santa Barbara, DataONE, and NOAA’s NCEI, each of which bring critical capabilities to the Center. Infrastructure from the successful NSF-sponsored DataONE federation of data repositories will enable data replication to NCEI, providing both offsite and institutional diversity that is critical to long term preservation.