Overview of ICARUS-A Curated, Open Access, Online Repository for Atmospheric Simulation Chamber Data.

Atmospheric simulation chambers continue to be indispensable tools for research in the atmospheric sciences. Insights from chamber studies are integrated into atmospheric chemical transport models, which are used for science-informed policy decisions. However, a centralized data management and access infrastructure for their scientific products had not been available in the United States and many parts of the world. ICARUS (Integrated Chamber Atmospheric data Repository for Unified Science) is an open access, searchable, web-based infrastructure for storing, sharing, discovering, and utilizing atmospheric chamber data [https://icarus.ucdavis.edu]. ICARUS has two parts: a data intake portal and a search and discovery portal. Data in ICARUS are curated, uniform, interactive, indexed on popular search engines, mirrored by other repositories, version-tracked, vocabulary-controlled, and citable. ICARUS hosts both legacy data and new data in compliance with open access data mandates. Targeted data discovery is available based on key experimental parameters, including organic reactants and mixtures that are managed using the PubChem chemical database, oxidant information, nitrogen oxide (NOx) content, alkylperoxy radical (RO2) fate, seed particle information, environmental conditions, and reaction categories. A discipline-specific repository such as ICARUS with high amounts of metadata works to support the evaluation and revision of atmospheric model mechanisms, intercomparison of data and models, and the development of new model frameworks that can have more predictive power in the current and future atmosphere. The open accessibility and interactive nature of ICARUS data may also be useful for teaching, data mining, and training machine learning models.

Science friction: data, metadata, and collaboration.

When scientists from two or more disciplines work together on related problems, they often face what we call 'science friction'. As science becomes more data-driven, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, demand increases for interoperability among data, tools, and services. Metadata--usually viewed simply as 'data about data', describing objects such as books, journal articles, or datasets--serve key roles in interoperability. Yet we find that metadata may be a source of friction between scientific collaborators, impeding data sharing. We propose an alternative view of metadata, focusing on its role in an ephemeral process of scientific communication, rather than as an enduring outcome or product. We report examples of highly useful, yet ad hoc, incomplete, loosely structured, and mutable, descriptions of data found in our ethnographic studies of several large projects in the environmental sciences. Based on this evidence, we argue that while metadata products can be powerful resources, usually they must be supplemented with metadata processes. Metadata-as-process suggests the very large role of the ad hoc, the incomplete, and the unfinished in everyday scientific work.

Metadata accounts: Achieving data and evidence in scientific research.

'Metadata' has received a fraction of the attention that 'data' has received in sociological studies of scientific research. A neglect of 'metadata' reduces the attention on a number of critical aspects of scientific work processes, including documentary work, accountability relations, and collaboration routines. Metadata processes and products are essential components of the work needed to practically accomplish day-to-day scientific research tasks, and are central to ensuring that research findings and products meet externally driven standards or requirements. This article is an attempt to open up the discussion on and conceptualization of metadata within the sociology of science and the sociology of data. It presents ethnographic research of metadata creation within everyday scientific practice, focusing on how researchers document, describe, annotate, organize and manage their data, both for their own use and the use of researchers outside of their project. In particular, this article argues that the role and significance of metadata within scientific research contexts are intimately tied to the nature of evidence and accountability within particular social situations. Studying metadata can (1) provide insight into the production of evidence, that is, how something we might call 'data' becomes able to serve an evidentiary role, and (2) provide a mechanism for revealing what people in research contexts are held accountable for, and what they achieve accountability with.

Assessing the uptake of persistent identifiers by research infrastructure users.

Significant progress has been made in the past few years in the development of recommendations, policies, and procedures for creating and promoting citations to data sets, software, and other research infrastructures like computing facilities. Open questions remain, however, about the extent to which referencing practices of authors of scholarly publications are changing in ways desired by these initiatives. This paper uses four focused case studies to evaluate whether research infrastructures are being increasingly identified and referenced in the research literature via persistent citable identifiers. The findings of the case studies show that references to such resources are increasing, but that the patterns of these increases are variable. In addition, the study suggests that citation practices for data sets may change more slowly than citation practices for software and research facilities, due to the inertia of existing practices for referencing the use of data. Similarly, existing practices for acknowledging computing support may slow the adoption of formal citations for computing resources.