A stroll through the Marine Biological Data Landscape (if you love your data, set them free)

Event Abstract Back to Event A stroll through the Marine Biological Data Landscape (if you love your data, set them free) Belén Martín Míguez1* 1 Center for Marine Research, University of Vigo, Spain Scientists are trained to zoom in at issues, problems, features… Part of our work as researchers consists of coming closer to the object of our research, and acquiring as much evidence as possible around it in order to understand it better. It is like we were equipped with a magnifying glass, that enabled us to see the smallest details. That brings about an inevitable feeling of ownership, of possession. The more familiar we are with a subject, the more comfortable we feel remaining in our zone of comfort and the more convinced we are that we have rights on the knowledge we are handling. Psychologists warn us about the risk of confusing love with possession. Sting sang “If you love somebody, set them free”. Obviously, loving a person is not the same than loving your data… but the mechanism behind may not be that different. This talk intends to contribute to a change of model, from the “Data belongs to scientists, to “Scientists only hold data in usufruct”. We will explain first the reasons behind this paradigm in the case of marine data. This will require looking at the marine data landscape and the myriad of institutions that have a say on the way research is eventually developed, i.e., the ocean governance framework. We will pay particular attention to those projects, organizations, policies and funding mechanisms related to marine biology, and how they can appear at different levels: international, European, regional… We will explain how free exchange of data is increasingly encouraged in this ocean governance framework. We will also shed some light on concepts such as “Open Data” “Democratization of information” and “FAIR principles”. Once we have found our way in that soup of acronyms, we will describe some of the advantages of setting free our data, including keeping them for the long-term, more possibilities of collaborations with other scientists and additional citation. We will then present two examples of initiatives related to making marine biological data more accessible. In the first one, we will focus on biodiversity data, from an international and European perspective touching upon initiatives such as OBIS and EMODnet. Secondly, we will provide an example of a European Research Infrastructure built around Marine Biological Stations (EMBRC, European Marine Biological Resource Centre) and we will show how this distributed infrastructure can foster free exchange of knowledge through its different services, including a Transnational Access Programme. Acknowledgements The author wishes to acknowledge inspirational discussion with colleagues like Rosa Fernández, Laura García and Luís Valdés References Wilkinson et al. (2016). The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Sci Data. 2016 Mar 15;3:160018. doi: 10.1038/sdata.2016.18 Keywords: Open Data, Marine data exchange, fair principles, EMBRC, Ocean governance, Marine Biology Conference: XX Iberian Symposium on Marine Biology Studies (SIEBM XX) , Braga, Portugal, 9 Sep - 12 Sep, 2019. Presentation Type: Keynote talk Topic: Keynote lecture Citation: Martín Míguez B (2019). A stroll through the Marine Biological Data Landscape (if you love your data, set them free). Front. Mar. Sci. Conference Abstract: XX Iberian Symposium on Marine Biology Studies (SIEBM XX) . doi: 10.3389/conf.fmars.2019.08.00009 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 15 Sep 2019; Published Online: 27 Sep 2019. * Correspondence: Mx. Belén Martín Míguez, Center for Marine Research, University of Vigo, Vigo, 36331, Spain, bmiguez@gmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. 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