Supporting Antarctic Research with Ongoing Operations and Development of the USAP-DC Project Catalog and Data Repository

Samples and data obtained by researchers working in Antarctica are valuable, unique assets which typically require a substantial and expensive logistical effort to acquire. Preservation of these data increases the return on the significant public investment for acquisition, enabling future re-use for new analyses, and ensure that data behind scientific publications are available for others to review. The US Antarctic Program Data Center (USAP-DC) will provide an open-disciplinary hybrid repository for project metadata and the diverse research data obtained from the Antarctic region by NSF funded researchers for which other data repositories do not exist. In addition, a Project Catalog will provide a single online resource for the US Antarctic scientific community to manage information about their research activities and will link project metadata to the various distributed repositories where Antarctic data resides. In doing so, the USAP-DC will follow community best practices and standards to ensure data are citable, shareable, and discoverable. It will also facilitate registration of data descriptions into the Antarctic Master Directory to meet US goals for data sharing under the International Antarctic Treaty.

With full open access to interfaces to search for and download data, USAP-DC will make a wide range of data products resulting from NSF funded research in Antarctica available not only to the research community but also to the broader public. The data center is operated using community standards for metadata and data access which helps ensure data re-usability into the future. The new Project catalog, which is designed to support consolidation of information on research products of USAP awards over the lifetime of a project, will make it simpler for NSF program managers, but also for individual researchers and especially larger collaborative research groups to keep track of datasets and related information produced as part of their projects. Through tutorials and meetings at conferences USAP-DC will contribute to raise awareness and inform the research community, especially new investigators about data management best practices.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.