Use case 11 – Create DOIs for datasets in paleontology database

The ESRF hosted paleontology database http://paleo.esrf.fr/ contains hundreds of unique datasets of ancient specimens from around the world. The database has been in existence since 2011. It contains mostly reconstructed data of 3D volumes of specimens. The specimens are mostly from museums around the world. Their ages range from thousands to hundreds of millions of years, which makes them difficult to access in real. Making the reconstructed 3D volumes available to scientists and the public in general is a very useful and relevant service for Open Science. Some of the data have been used in a number of publications, whereas other data are still to be exploited. The data are made freely available under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.

The use case is to create DOIs for each of the hundreds of datasets so that they can be cited in publications and be re-used by as many scientists as possible. Providing DOIs will make them more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, i.e. FAIR.

Description of needs

• DOIs for all datasets published on the https://doi.esrf.fr site;
• All datasets to be ingested into the ESRF data repository so they can be browsed and downloaded from the repository;
• The original url via http://paleo.esrf.eu must resolve to the data repository so that existing publications are still valid;
• A web portal which can be organised by categories to make it easy for users to browse (similar to paleo.esrf.eu).

Use case action flow

1. Ingest paleo.esrf.eu datasets into ESRF icat data repository;
2. Mint DOIs for each dataset;
3. Archive datasets for 10 years or more.

Impacts from the implementation

Technical impact is that scientists can cite the paleontology data in their publications. Scientific impact is that it will encourage more scientists to re-use this data even if they were not part of the original experiment.

Generalisation of the use case

There is a general need to have DOIs on all data. This is not the case for old data or processed data. This use case highlights this need.

Resources

http://paleo.esrf.eu
https://gitlab.esrf.fr/icat/E-DataPortal
https://datacite.org/

https://data.esrf.fr
https://doi.esrf.fr

Other resources

Examples of datasets:

1. http://paleo.esrf.eu/picture.php?/5248/category/2846
2. http://paleo.esrf.eu/picture.php?/395/category/1539

Contact person

Andy Götz (ESRF)