FAIR DATA IN THE PALEOGEOSCIENCES: TALKING THE TALK, WALKING THE WALK

Community adoption of FAIR principles requires support at all levels. Academic insittutions must support researchers by valuing the effort required to ensure open and accessible publications, community data resources must provide guidance and tools to properly manage their resources within open workflows, funding bodies must provide resources to support and sustain the management of open and reproducible work funded through their agencies.

Within this set of interacting requirements, community curated data resources such as the Neotoma Paleoecology Database have made significant efforts to foster FAIR principles within their communities. The long history of data sharing within the paleoecology community, starting with COHMAP is carried through to current activities, including the open development of “best practices” workflows, ongoing analysis of data resources, open development of APIs and database resources, and continued engagement with the research community to foster greater sharing and reproducibility within the community.

This presentation will showcase efforts made at the community level, through Neotoma, and at the individual work, through my own efforts in integrating FAIR principles into paleoecological research performed as part of my own research program. I will also make an effort to show how the individual and community needs help reinforce design decisions within Neotoma, and how we as a community can help support broader adoption of FAIR principles, by cultivating a broad set of skills, and providing tools to help raise the entire community up towards FAIR standards.