One thing that has become apparent in our FAIR Island Project is that there is not a standard way to acknowledge the field station where the research was done. Researchers come from all over the world and have their own home institutions, which they list as their affiliation. When they publish, they may mention the station in the body of the text or they might include in acknowledgments, but this becomes a burden on the field station staff to find these distributed mentions. At the same time, field stations must prove that they are valuable and report to institutions and funders the impact they have had.
During the ESIP July 2022 meeting a few weeks ago there was a session on ‘Giving Credit Where Credit is Due.’ The purpose of the session was to highlight how credit is being given to a variety of artifacts. Kelly Stathis, DataCite and Ted Habermann, Metadata Game Changers gave a talk on the use of contributor types in DataCite metadata.
They highlighted our recent, experimental approach of linking the field station to data management plans was highlighted. In the figure below, you can see that Tetiaroa Society is included, and while the name is displayed visibly, the ROR, or the organizational persistent identifier is included.
The Tetiaroa Society link in the figure above is to the ROR search in the DataCite Commons. When we go to that page we see all the works begin to accumulate. So far there are two items that have listed the Tetiaroa Society – a dataset, hosted in Dryad and the DMP that is shown in the figure above. As more works are connected through this contributor type relationship this will expand into a more useful resource for the field station staff.
