Rolling Deck to Repository: Supporting the marine science community with data management services from academic research expeditions - Carbotte, Suzanne M.; O’Hara, Suzanne; Stocks, Karen; Clark, P. Dru; Stolp, Laura; Smith, Shawn R.; Briggs, Kristen; Hudak, Rebecca; Miller, Emily; Olson, Chris J.; Shane, Neville; Uribe, Rafael; et al. (Frontiers in Marine Science, 2022)
Direct observations of the oceans acquired on oceanographic research ships operated across the international community support fundamental research into the many disciplines of ocean science and provide essential information for monitoring the health of the oceans. A comprehensive knowledge base is needed to support the responsible stewardship of the oceans with easy access to all data acquired globally. In the United States, the multidisciplinary shipboard sensor data routinely acquired each year on the fleet of coastal, regional and global ranging vessels supporting academic marine research are managed by the Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R, rvdata.us) program. With over a decade of operations, the R2R program has developed a robust routinized system to transform diverse data contributions from different marine data providers into a standardized and comprehensive collection of global-ranging observations of marine atmosphere, ocean, seafloor and subseafloor properties that is openly available to the international research community. To manage all expeditions conducted annually, a fleet-wide approach using data distributions submitted from marine operators has been developed with a data management workflow designed to maximize automation of data curation. Other design goals are to improve the completeness and consistency of the data and metadata archived, to support data citability, provenance tracking and interoperable data access aligned with FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) recommendations, and to facilitate delivery of data from the fleet for global data syntheses. In this article we describe the elements of the R2R fleet-wide data management system as well as findings from a collection-level review of changes in data acquisition practices and quality over the past decade. Lessons learned from R2R operations working upstream in the data lifecycle close to data providers and across the research fleet are discussed, including the benefits of designing data curation around the routine practices of data providers, approaches for ensuring preservation of a more complete data collection with a high level of FAIRness, and the opportunities for homogenization of datasets from the fleet so that they can support the broadest re-use of data across a diverse user community.