GEOSCIENCE, EDUCATION AND UNPUBLISHED RESEARCH DATA

Training students and teachers in Earth Sciences has gained some well-deserved urgency in recent years, and research projects have become an integral part of the improvement in the programs. Research projects can be segments of ongoing activities of academics that eventually are published as peer-reviewed papers, but some projects yield distinct results that are not regularly incorporated into the literature. The MAT program for Earth Science teachers at the American Museum of Natural History has produced several such projects annually in its first three years. The quality of the analyses or interpretations is typically of publication grade but the effort required to completely synthesize the research into a publishable manuscript transcends the time and capability of either the student researchers or the academic mentors. Consequently, the results languish in scientific limbo, neither published nor unworthy of recognition.

Some institutions put the results of these projects on-line, so they are available without peer-review but not necessarily readily retrievable by someone searching for such information. More commonly, the data or reports reside on personal computers or in file folders where they will not be accessible, perhaps ever. A recognized system is required to bring these projects out of the darkness, for the betterment of science and education. Such a system should have some method of vetting, probably short of multiple, third-party, peer review, but require authorship including a responsible researcher with an educational/scientific institution. In addition, an indexing or registration system through a project like EarthCube and digital access via the Internet will permit ready access to the research projects produced by educational programs that can contain new and substantive data or interpretations that might otherwise be lost.