DataCite is pleased to welcome USGS to the DataCite community. USGS is one of the largest government scientific agencies in the world and was created by an act of the US Congress over 125 years ago. With vast holdings in Earth and biological data, USGS is leading the way with research into ecosystems, climate and land use change, energy and mineral assessments, environmental health, natural hazards, and water resources.
USGS has long maintained a strong commitment to public access to scientific results through peer-reviewed publications and access to data generated from research funded by USGS. From the beginning USGS has held data sharing as part of its mission – a mandate to publish and publicly share USGS data and findings from USGS science activities dates to the Bureau’s founding in 1879. In a step to make USGS science even more accessible to the public, USGS officially launched their new public access plan on October 1, 2016. The new plan applies to both research data and scholarly publications. On the data side of the plan, USGS will rely on its Science Data Catalog for discovery and access to data resulting from its funded research.
DOIs are an important component of USGS’ public access plan. USGS works with Crossref and DataCite (currently via EZID) to assign and register DOIs to support the unique identification, citation, attribution and cross-referencing between related resources such as data, videos, software, and publications.
There are several areas that DataCite is looking forward to working with USGS on. First, we are particularly interested in working with USGS on linking data to publications – this dovetails with DataCite’s work on Event Data, where DataCite exposes the activity that occurs around research data objects like data and publications. Second, USGS now requires researchers to obtain an ORCID to unambiguously identify scientists. The use of ORCID iDs will allow synchronization of research across USGS’ various systems – this is very similar to the DataCite and ORCID’s work on the THOR project. Finally, USGS has years of experience developing and managing rich metadata for increased access and discovery, and DataCite looks forward to their expertise in this area through participation in DataCite working groups and symposiums.
