A Vision for the Future Low-Temperature Geochemical Data-scape

Data sharing benefits the researcher, the scientific community, and most importantly, the public by enabling more impactful analysis of data and greater transparency in scientific research. However, like many other scientists, the low-temperature geochemistry (LTG) community has generally not developed protocols and standards for publishing, citing, and versioning datasets. This paper is the product of a group of LTG and data scientists convened to strategize about the future management of LTG data. The group observed that the current landscape of sites for LTG – the data-scape -- is a “street bazaar” of data repositories. This was deemed appropriate because LTG scientists target many different scientific questions and produce data with different structures and volumes described by copious and complex metadata. Nonetheless, the group agreed that publication of LTG science must be accompanied by sharing of data in publicly accessible repositories. To enable this for sample-based data, samples should be registered with globally unique persistent identifiers. LTG scientists should be able to use both highly structured databases designed for specialized types of data or generalized, unstructured, and non-targeted data repositories. The group strategized that the overall data informatics paradigm should shift from “build data repository, data will come” to “publish data online, cybertools will find.” In other words, the most important need within the growing and complex data-scape is for increasingly powerful tools for searching and cross-referencing data across the proliferating data repositories. This strategy requires increasing emphasis on data science and data management for LTG professionals and students.