Innovations in Open Science (IOS) Planning Workshop: Community Expectations for a Geoscience Data Commons - Workshop Report

The National Science Foundation Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences (NSF-AGS) and the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) funded Innovations in Open Science (IOS) Planning Workshop: Community Expectations for a Geoscience Data Commons was held from May 29-31, 2024 in Boulder Colorado. The workshop brought together a diverse group of over 70 participants to provide a variety of perspectives on community needs for a geoscience research data commons environment. Stakeholder communities represented at the workshop included geoscience researchers and students (weighted towards the Atmospheric, Hydrologic, Geospace and Oceanic sciences) from US Universities (including Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)), technology experts, representatives from open source communities of practice such as Pangeo 1, private sector organizations, and data repository personnel. The overall goal of the workshop was to ask participants to develop recommendations to satisfy community needs for geoscience research data commons from a broad range of perspectives. Additionally, we wanted to build a welcoming and inclusive community through the workshop that will provide the foundation for continued collaborative activities that result from the workshop. The workshop agenda was organized with three predefined plenary and breakout discussion session themes, that included: 1) Big ideas and existing solutions for data services and data analytics capabilities, 2) Data commons analytics research and educational user needs, and 3) data producer needs for data curation and consulting services. For each of these themes there was a plenary session that included 5 topical talks to promote ideas and stimulate discussion in breakout sessions that followed. The breakout sessions included 7 separate breakout groups that workshop participants were randomly assigned to, and each of these groups discussed identical questions for these first 3 workshop themes. A 4th breakout session took place during the last day of the workshop. For this session, workshop participants were given the opportunity to suggest and vote on breakout group themes that they felt would be of value for further discussion. A number of recommendations were developed as a result of the workshop discussions. The recommendations are organized around the components of the Global Open Research Commons (GORC) model shown in Figure 1, which was introduced at the start of the workshop and provides a robust framework for structuring the topics that were discussed during the workshop.