Scientia Arctica: A Knowledge Archive for Discovery and Reproducible Science in the Arctic

Investigators at the University of California Santa Barbara, DataONE, and NOAA will build and operate a multi-institutional knowledge archive serving diverse Arctic disciplines, including ecology, earth science, atmospheric science, oceanography, anthropology, archaeology, and social and political science. The Scientia Arctica archive will provide unprecedented capabilities to 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, using infrastructure from the successful NSF-sponsored DataONE federation of data repositories. Storage will utilize the KNB Data Repository for its strong versioning and accessioning to enable an effective archive. Data will be replicated to administratively diverse institutions (NCEI and the Amazon cloud), as this is critical to long term preservation. DataONE researcher-facing tools will be adapted to provide convenient pathways to document and archive diverse data formats as part of scientists’ normal workflows (e.g., both through the web and via analytical tools such as Matlab, R, and IDL). This infrastructure will be supported with an outstanding set of community services, including data discovery tools, metadata assessment and editing, data cleansing and integration, data management consulting, and user help-desk services. A data recovery team will engage the community to prioritize and rescue critical Arctic data from past NSF research that is currently inaccessible. In addition to the traditional functions of a data archive, modern cloud-based data facilities will support detailed provenance tracking of the science process, data usage and citation reporting, linkages among heterogeneous disciplines, and direct linkages between the literature, investigators, and funding programs through the use of DOI, ORCID, and FundRef identifiers. Usability and outreach specialists will engage an interdisciplinary Arctic Science Advisory Board and the broader polar science communities to drive continuous improvement by evaluating tools and services, gathering requirements and use cases, and prioritizing improvements to infrastructure and service offerings of the archive. Usage data and usability studies will drive an iterative cycle of assessment and development to improve operations. A sustainability model will be vetted and phased in to provide long-term curation and preservation of research that ultimately has a broad impact on science and societally critical policy issues in the Arctic.