Proposal for a Workshop to Bring Together a Community of Paleontology Journals, Online Article Repositories, and Databases to Chart a FAIR Future for Their Data

This workshop will bring together members of the paleontology community to determine best practices for sharing and reusing published scientific data. This workshop will provide collaborative space to generate and exchange ideas and strategies, especially in today’s rapidly changing scientific publishing and data dissemination landscape, where emerging methods are increasing the amount of data that can be harvested from scientific papers.

The workshop will focus on: 1) new approaches to data gathering to support and facilitate scientific research; 2) ways to ensure that researchers who contribute paleontological data, as well as the journals that publish it, receive proper credit and are supported and recognized for their work; 3) ways to ensure that data sources can be continually verified, modified, and updated; and 4) new and innovative ways to use these data to engage with the public. Workshop participants reflect the breadth of the field and include editors of paleontology journals, developers of fossil databases, and individuals and organizations involved with sharing scientific literature, collections, data, and educational resources online.

Scientific publishing and data dissemination are changing rapidly with the development of new methods that extract high volumes of data from scientific papers. In paleontology, systematic publications contain extensive amounts of data that have not been previously culled. These systematic data are foundational to paleontology, and the publications represent invaluable repositories for several scientific disciplines.

The workshop comprises plans to develop the most effective ideas and approaches to make these data resources and publications Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) and to encourage community support for this effort. This workshop will convene editors of peer-reviewed journals, contributors to online data-sharing platforms, organizations sharing systematics literature online, and practitioners in systematics, collections digitization, and education.

The specific aims of the workshop are to generate and share techniques and approaches to: 1) best enable the rapid collection of paleontological data from the literature to make data more broadly available to scientists and the public; 2) better ensure that authors and venues that publish these data be properly cited and credited; 3) develop methods to continually evaluate the veracity of the underlying data; and 4) better connect authors and publishers with those building and maintaining the databases to create a mutually supportive framework.

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.