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

Scientific data from Antarctica are valuable, often unique research assets. Preservation of these data increases the return on the significant public investment for acquisition, enabling future re-use for new analyses, and supports scientific reproducibility ensuring that observations behind scientific publications are available for others to review. The US Antarctic Program Data Center (USAP-DC) contributes to the preservation and discoverability of research data acquired with funding from NSF’s Office of Polar Programs by providing a repository for diverse research data from the Antarctic region. USAP-DC provides a space for researchers to share their data and assists them in making their data as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reproducible (FAIR) as possible. USAP-DC enables finding and accessing datasets through web-based search and map interfaces, and by sharing and distributing metadata information of the different datasets widely with other search tools and catalogs. With full open access to interfaces to search for and download data, USAP-DC makes a wide range of data products resulting from NSF-funded research in Antarctica publicly available and thus supports the NSF mission to provide broad access to data and enable their use and reuse. The USAP-DC also aims to increase data literacy and participation in Antarctic science by working with students and early career researchers from under-represented groups to facilitate access to data resources.USAP-DC will continue to provide and improve a broad range of data repository and discovery services. New developments will be designed to encourage data submissions that are more aligned with the FAIR principles. This includes tutorials and best practice guides for data submissions as well as establishing a FAIRness score for datasets. This score will provide feedback to data providers on how Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable their data are. In addition, we will overhaul the user interface and search functions to keep the designs current and further expand findability and usability of datasets. This includes the development of preview functions for specific dataset types and options for users to provide more detailed location information.This project is co-funded by a collaboration between the Directorate for Geosciences and Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to support AI/ML and open science activities in the geosciences.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.