Open Data and more in the Geosciences – an introduction to GFZ Data Services

For more than a decade, there is an increasing international demand for free and open access to publicly funded scientific research products. These include “classical” text manuscripts, data and software underlying scholarly publications, raw and curated observational data, and many more. Essential for the long-term preservation and re-use of these scientific datasets is the storage in appropriate, ideally domain specific repositories, accompanied by comprehensive data description and sufficient metadata for data discovery. These should include a licence for data re-use and sharing. Scientific datasets should be published using citable Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

GFZ Data Services is a repository for research data and scientific software across the Earth System Sciences, hosted at GFZ. The curated data are archived, persistently accessible and published with DOI. They range from large dynamic datasets from global monitoring networks with real-time acquisition, to international services in geodesy and geophysics, to the full suite of small and highly heterogeneous datasets collected by individual researchers or small teams ("long-tail data"). In addition to the DOI registration and data archiving itself, GFZ Data Services team offers comprehensive consultation by domain scientists and IT specialists.

This presentation will introduce to the broad service portfolio of GFZ Data Services, including project-specific DOI landing pages for our national and international partners, data curation practices, supporting tools like the online metadata editor, data description templates and extensive data publication guidelines. It will further show examples of how metadata exchange with other data portals is increasing the visibility of our data publications.