Data Sustainability and Reuse Pathways of Natural Resources and Environmental Scientists

TL;DR

This study explores natural resources and environmental scientists' experiences with data management, highlighting challenges, values, and opportunities for sustainable data reuse and curation within institutional and policy contexts.

Contribution

It provides insights into scientists' data practices and suggests strategies for enhancing data sustainability, stewardship, and accessibility in environmental research.

Findings

Scientists face barriers in data sharing and reuse.

Shared values influence data management practices.

Recommendations for data modeling and curation strategies.

Abstract

This paper presents a multifarious examination of natural resources and environmental scientists' adventures navigating the policy change towards open access and cultural shift in data management, sharing, and reuse. Situated in the institutional context of Virginia Tech, a focus group and multiple individual interviews were conducted exploring the domain scientists' all-around experiences, performances, and perspectives on their collection, adoption, integration, preservation, and management of data. The results reveal the scientists' struggles, concerns, and barriers encountered, as well as their shared values, beliefs, passions, and aspirations when working with data. Based on these findings, this study provides suggestions on data modeling and knowledge representation strategies to support the long-term viability, stewardship, accessibility, and sustainability of scientific data. It also discusses the art of curation as creative scholarship and new opportunities for data librarians and information professionals to mobilize the data revolution.