Date

NSF Announcement
NSF funds new $5.9 million Arctic data center
University of California, Santa Barbara

To view the orignial announcement, go to:
http://tinyurl.com/NSF-ArcticDataCenter


The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a five-year, $5.9 million
award to a national partnership, led by the National Center for
Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, to develop and curate a new archive for
Arctic scientific data as well as other related research documents.

When the new archive, the NSF Arctic Data Center, is launched later this
month, it will serve as the NSF Arctic research community's primary
repository for data preservation and data discovery. NCEAS will run the
new center under a cooperative agreement with NSF.

"The NSF Arctic Data Center will provide the data storage, curation, and
discovery features needed to support NSF's Arctic science community, and
we will be actively engaging researchers to determine how to improve
support for open, reproducible science for the Arctic," said Matthew
Jones, director of informatics research and development at NCEAS and
principal investigator for the NSF award. "The data center will be able
to archive not just data, but other research products such as software,
workflows and provenance information about the entire research process."

Jones added that NSF "has been forward-thinking in not only providing
guidance for their investigators to implement data management planning
but also in providing a repository explicitly for preserving Arctic
research data that are valuable in addressing social and environmental
issues."

NSF has required data management planning as part of research proposals
since 2011.

The data center will offer not only access to the data itself, but will
also offer researchers features to allow them to work with the data in
new and different ways.

"NSF is pleased to support NCEAS and its partner organizations in this
effort to make Arctic data available to researchers across the world,"
said Marc Stieglitz, NSF Arctic natural sciences program manager. "This
is particularly important now because of the rapid pace of Arctic
environmental change. This new facility will help researchers study
Arctic change and inform societal decision-making."

The new data center interface will allow users to search for data from
the extensive Arctic data collection using filters, such as the name of
data creator, year, identifier, taxa, location and keywords and others.
The "discovery interface" will also provide a map-based overview of the
spatial distribution of data sets and allow users to zoom and pan to
specific locations of interest, which will be helpful in locating
historical data in specific regions.

Authors will be able to seamlessly upload and share their data from
their desktop, contributing associated metadata and assigning a Digital
Object Identifier so that their data are easily citable. The data center
team will also continue to support data management planning and access
to Arctic data publications, in addition to user support services.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Centers
for Environmental Information (NCEI) and the NSF-funded Data Observation
Network for Earth (DataONE) are partners in the Arctic data center
cooperative agreement between NSF and NCEAS.

"NOAA has active and growing interests in the Arctic," said Eric Kihn,
director of NCEI's Center for Coasts, Oceans, and Geophysics, adding,
"NCEI is pleased to leverage our existing scientific data stewardship
infrastructure and expertise to support this effort to preserve and make
available the Nation's extensive investments in Arctic observations and
information."

"This is a welcome advance for open data and a great benefit to the
Arctic research community," he added. The NSF Arctic Data Center will
support this community with the release of a user-friendly, data sharing
platform built on an open-source search application developed at NCEAS
and used by multiple repositories and networks, including the NCEAS' KNB
Data Repository, DataONE, and the Gulf of Alaska Data Portal.

An extensive data management and open science training program for
Arctic researchers will launch late in the first year of the program and
will target early career and underrepresented groups.

A webinar to introduce the the data center system to the Arctic research
community is scheduled for April 21. Registration information may be
found at the NSF Arctic Data Center website. Full details about the data
center's partners, leadership and steering committee may also be found
on the website.

The new archive will succeed the extensive Arctic data collection
curated by the Advanced Cooperative Arctic Data and Information Service
(ACADIS), which is managed by the National Center for Atmospheric
Research and the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

To view the original announcement, go to:
http://tinyurl.com/NSF-ArcticDataCenter.


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