FISHNet: encouraging data sharing and reuse in the freshwater science community

Authors

  • Mark Hedges King's College London
  • Mike Haft Freshwater Biological Association
  • Gareth Knight King's College London

Keywords:

freshwater, biology, data sharing, data publication, data reuse, data repositories, DOI, Fedora

Abstract

This paper describes the FISHNet project, which developed a repository environment for the curation and sharing of data relating to freshwater science, a discipline whose research community is distributed thinly across a variety of institutions, and usually works in relative isolation as individual researchers or within small groups. As in other “small sciences”, these datasets tend to be small and “hand-crafted”, created to address particular research questions rather than with a view to reuse, so they are rarely curated effectively, and the potential for sharing and reusing them is limited. The paper addresses a variety of issues and concerns raised by freshwater researchers as regards data sharing, describes our approach to developing a repository environment that addresses these concerns, and identifies the potential impact within the research community of the system.

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Published

2012-03-08