Data-intensive science communities are progressively adopting FAIR practices that enhance the visibility of scientific breakthroughs and enable reuse. At the core of this movement, research objects contain and describe scientific information and resources in a way compliant with the FAIR principles and sustain the development of key infrastructure and tools. This paper provides an account of the challenges, experiences and solutions involved in the adoption of FAIR around research objects over several Earth Science disciplines. During this journey, our work has been comprehensive, with outcomes including: an extended research object model adapted to the needs of earth scientists; the provisioning of digital object identifiers (DOI) to enable persistent identification and to give due credit to authors; the generation of content-based, semantically rich, research object metadata through natural language processing, enhancing visibility and reuse through recommendation systems and third-party search engines; and various types of checklists that provide a compact representation of research object quality as a key enabler of scientific reuse. All these results have been integrated in ROHub, a platform that provides research object management functionality to a wealth of applications and interfaces across different scientific communities. To monitor and quantify the community uptake of research objects, we have defined indicators and obtained measures via ROHub that are also discussed herein.

Over recent decades large amounts of data about our Planet have become available. If this information could be easily discoverable, accessible and properly exploited, preserved and shared, it would potentially represent a wealth of information for a whole spectrum of stakeholders: from scientists and researchers to the highest level of decision and policy makers. By creating a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) using a service oriented architecture (SOA) tailored to the needs of Earth Science (ES) communities, the EVER-EST ( http://ever-est.eu ) project provides a range of both generic and domain specific data analysis and management services to support a dynamic approach to collaborative research. EVER-EST provides the means to overcome existing barriers to sharing of Earth Science data and information allowing research teams to discover, access, share and process heterogeneous data, algorithms, results and experiences within and across their communities, including those domains beyond Earth Science. The main objective of this paper is to present the EVER-EST platform in all its components describing the most relevant use cases implemented by the Virtual Research Communities (VRCs) involved in the project.

Without an approach accepted by the communities at large, domain disagreements will continue to thwart current global efforts to harmonize information models. The research presented here reviewed current standardization activities. A number of observations and possible solutions are proposed to address the topic of standardizing long term access to multi-discipline Earth System archives by considering the application of the knowledge base concept to facilitate data interpretation. Finally, we present a case study as an initial entry point for the further discussion about standardization.

The volume of scientific research results in Earth Science is growing tremendously, so their preservation is becoming more and more appeal ing. Large amount of data is already affecting many fields of science, most notably fiel ds ike, space with both new satellite surveys and new deployments of extensive sensor net works, oceanography with deployments of underwater oceanographic observatori es, geophysics with past and new seismograph data, etc. This trend will not be confi ned to the physical sciences but will also transform large parts of the humanities and so cial sciences. Mechanisms, infrastructures and software solutions should be in place to enable sustainable long-term preservation of scientific re sults in digital form. Common preservation policies and their application by Eart h Science data owners and providers should be defined to guarantee preservation of data and associated knowledge according to a common and harmonized approach and their acces sibility by users according to their needs. Furthermore Earth Science communities use va rious models (conceptual models, metadata schemas, ontologies, vocabularies) for des cribing their datasets. Ideally we would like a common set of models for Earth science data, and a common strategy for harmonizing them. The purpose of this paper, which summarizes some of the work done in the context of the SCIDIP-ES project, is to describe the Earth Science ne ds, procedures and gaps in terms of the current data preservation and data access po licies, perform an analysis of the current Earth Science data infrastructures, identify the ga ps with respect to the Earth Science community requirements and interoperability aspects , and define common data preservation policies which are applicable to all E arth Science data categories. Furthermore an analysis of the semantics, metadata and ontologies that are currently in use by earth scientists is presented. Based on this ana lysis, possible strategies for having harmonized metadata, semantics and ontologies are p roposed, able to satisfy the earth scientists’ needs coping with different Earth Scien e domain approaches.

The effective preservation of both current and historical scientific data will underpin a multitude of ecological, economic and political decisions that shape the future of our society. The SCIDIP-ES project addresses the long-term preservation of the knowledge encoded in scientific data by providing preservation einfrastructure services which support the persistent storage, access and management needs. Using exemplars from the Earth Science domain we highlight the key preservation challenges and barriers to be overcome by the SCIDIP-ES infrastructure. SCIDIP-ES augments existing science data e-infrastructures by adding specific services and toolkits which implement core preservation concepts, thus guaranteeing the long-term access and exploitation of data assets across and beyond their designated communities.

The proper preservation of both the current and historical scientific data will underpin a multitude of ecological, economic and political decisions in the future of our society. The SCIDIP-ES project addresses the long-term persistent storage, access and management needs of scientific data by providing preservation infrastructure services. Taking exemplars from the Earth Science domain we highlight the key preservation challenges and barriers to be overcome by the SCIDIP-ES infrastructure. SCIDIP-ES augments existing science data e-infrastructures by adding specific services and toolkits, which implement core preservation concepts, thus guaranteeing the long-term access to data assets across and beyond their designated communities.