Open Research Data from Eawag and WSL is published through their respective institutional research data repositories ERIC (https://opendata.eawag.ch) and the environmental data portal EnviDat (https://envidat.ch). Both repositories offer guidance and support to researchers throughout the publication process and strive to achieve the highest quality for environmental research data publications [Hering et al., 2018; Iosifescu et al. 2018, 2019; von Waldow, 2020].
Recent surveys reveal that the fraction of research data shared for future reuse is still low [Goben & Griffin, 2019; von der Heyde, 2019]. Both Eawag and WSL foster data publication by providing appropriate infrastructure and workflows.
We have jointly conceptualized and implemented a workflow that chains together researcher input, automatic validation, interactive quality checks, and iterative improvement of (meta-)data quality.
An essential requirement of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principle [Wilkinson et al. 2016] is the assignment of a persistent identifier. We therefore assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to all open datasets. Our workflow is designed to make maximal use of the latest DataCite metadata-schema [DataCite, 2019] for DOIs and exploits for example its ability to store spatial information about environmental measurements.
The data publication workflow considers a number of steps, starting with the request for a DOI, going through an approval process with a double-checking principle, and ending with the submission of the metadata-record to DataCite and the final data publication in ERIC or EnviDat, respectively. We are looking forward to sharing the workflow, code, practices and related recommendations with the community.