European Long-Term Ecosystem and Socio-Ecological Research Infrastructure, D3.2 Governance and data policy for sharing and publishing of data.

Abstract

The site network of LTER Europe provides an important source of data for the assessment and understanding of ecosystem processes and their relation to environmental pressures and threats. LTER is organised by different national networks sharing a common conceptual basis, but managed by different organisations with their own funding regimes and organisation structures. The eLTER H2020 project aims to develop a common information management infrastructure for making data from the different distributed resources available, not only for the scientific expert but also for a more general use. Efforts are taken to harmonise measurements with the aim of building a sustainable research infrastructure for long term ecosystem observations. Innovative solutions are needed in order to allow the discovery and access of the data in near real time. This includes the documentation of the observation context as well as facilitating data services to provide online access to the data. Within eLTER H2020, an information infrastructure has been implemented to document and share the data. The system builds on a network of distributed data services integrated by a central discovery portal and federated data access components. This document addresses the social and related socio-technical aspects of data publishing within a network of distributed data sources. In the first part, data policies from the project partners as well as from thematically related research infrastructures and networks, together with Open Research Data Policy are evaluated. As a result, a common eLTER Data Policy and data sharing agreements within and beyond the project has been developed. In the second part of the document, governance issues of common data sharing principles are addressed. An overview on the actions taken to provide the basis of decisions for the design and the implementation of the eLTER data infrastructure are given. Also, the basic high-level user stories defined in order to provide a basis for the evaluation of different architectures and the related existing or planned tools are described.