Social scientists funded through the National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center (NCCWSC) and the Climate Science Centers (CSCs) have an obligation to provide access to their climate science related research data. We suspect, as with other data types, that tools for creating and editing social science metadata specific to the climate science domain and linking the metadata to the actual data either do not exist or are non-intuitive for scientists. Through our research we sought to verify whether any definitive metadata tool for social scientists working in the climate science domain exists. We also sought to determine whether a commonly agreed upon social science metadata standard exists. We suspect that...
The aim of this project is to facilitate expansion of current data management protocols to accommodate social science data for the USGS National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center (NCCWSC) and its regional Climate Science Centers (CSCs). To address this expansion, we (1) identified the best practices and approaches from practitioners/experts through interviews with current curators of social science data, (2) explored the approaches of existing tools and services to determine if they are capable of meeting the needs of the NCCWSC, and (3) conducted a survey of the specific user community, with a focus on social science researchers funded by the NCCWSC and managers of the data within the program. The dataset...
In order for the field of science to uphold principles of transparency, openness, and reproducibility, policies and practices that incentivize the open sharing of data will be needed (Nosek et al.,2015). A shift to a more open science paradigm will require changes on the parts of government agencies, academicinstitutions, funding agencies/organizations, journals, and the researchers themselves. For example, journals are now beginning to require that data be shared in order for manuscripts to be published in accordance with guidelines created by the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Committee (Nosek et al.,2015). Major biophysical and social science journals are among the signatories to the TOP guidelines,...
