Program News and Announcements

21 September 2023

Open Source Science Data Repositories Workshop 27-29 September 2023

Please join us on 27-29 September 2023 for the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) annual workshop on NASA Science Data Repositories. The workshop will be two full days with an optional half-day at the end for participants to take the Transform to Open Science (TOPS) Open Science 101 Training: The Ethos of Open Science. Participants taking the TOPS training should plan on attending the event for 2.5 days.

The theme for this year’s workshop is “FAIR for NASA Data”. The NASA SMD Information policy (SPD-41a) [PDF] says that NASA data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), but what does that really mean in detail? The FAIR principles have gained broad acceptance around the world, but data repositories and providers still struggle with the details of their implementation. The goal of this year’s workshop is to begin to develop more detailed guidance for SMD data repositories and data providers on how to make their data more FAIR.

This is an open meeting geared towards researchers, Big Data teams, and archivists at the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Data Repositories along with missions and community members working in these areas.

Key Objectives

Improve understanding and align interpretation of the specific 15 FAIR principles in the NASA context.
Identify areas of collaborative and integrated effort for adhering to the principles (e.g., governance processes) and where more work is needed; begin to lay out a roadmap.
Identify where to develop common guidelines for key FAIR practices such as identifiers and licenses for data.
Identify consistent and effective means of user engagement since it is the users who ultimately decide if data are FAIR.

To register for the workshop, please use this Google Form. The Workshop’s agenda can be found here.

Pre-Workshop materials, including slides and recordings from two webinars and a summary of results from a survey of NASA data repositories on their FAIR practices can be found on the workshop webpage.

Please direct any questions to Mark Parsons (Lead Event Point of Contact) at map0046@uah.edu, and Molly Adams (Lead Event Coordinator) at molly.h.adams@nasa.gov.