Data Curation in the Era of Research Infrastructures

Abstract

Governments and funding bodies enact policies to set up Research Infrastructures (RIs) to integrate data from different environmental monitoring research sites. The goal of such policies is to publicly open access to research data to support research and innovation and to develop policies for sustaining RIs and the environment at large. However, little is known about the data curation practices of environmental monitoring research scientists at the origins of data. Informed by practice theories on the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday organisational work, the study zooms-in on the data curation
practices utilised by environmental monitoring research scientists to create data that is of good quality and reliable for sharing. Early findings are based on observations and semi-structured interviews of participants in environmental research sites, who collaborate on taking samples of animal and plant species in marine and terrestrial environments. We find that data curation at the origins of data are rife with challenges and opportunities in: data competence, data management and data quality practices. This poster submission concludes with implications of such practices for data governance of large-scale RIs.