My data collection is complete, now what? Connecting researchers to Data Repositories that can support Cold Regions Researchers

Abstract

The natural climate variability of the cold regions, together with the relatively sparse observational data sets and difficult terrain can make data collection which supports key science challenging. Notwithstanding, investments are constantly made by funders to support data collection in cold regions and as such it is important to ensure data from these regions are properly deposited and preserved according to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles. The goal of this work is to do a comprehensive review of data repositories that can support researchers working in Canada. We evaluated the Federated Research Data Repository, Scholars Portal Dataverse, DataStream, Polar Data Catalogue, PANGAEA, and Zenodo are the repositories selected as they appear to be most popular amongst cold regions researchers. A thorough review was done on these data repository by analyzing 33 key characteristics. The findings of this work would be relevant to researchers, such as: the curation method for data depositing, dataset storage allocation, and persistent identifier support, among other characteristics of interest. It is hoped that this review will provide additional insights to the research community when they are deciding on repositories which best fits their data needs, and thus ultimately it will help to enhance access to data in cold regions.