Promote Open Science within the DRIIHM Interdisciplinary Research Facility on Human-Environment Interactions: Co-design of an e-infrastructure implementing the FAIR Principles – SO-DRIIHM

As part of the international Open Science movement, this project deals with the structuration, sharing and opening of research data in the context of a network of thirteen CNRS-INEE observatories (OHMs): the Interdisciplinary Research Facility on Human-Environment Interactions supported by the ANR (LabEx DRIIHM 2012-2025). This network involves nearly 1000 scientists. Large amounts of heterogeneous data are produced or collected, covering research in Natural and Life Sciences, and Human and Social Sciences. Several initiatives have been carried out within the LabEx DRIIHM to increase visibility and data sharing to connect scientific teams that are not always linked, promote the re-use of data and potentially lead to the emergence of new research topics. A range of tools has been developed over the years: metadata geo-catalogs, web GIS platforms, photo libraries, HAL collections, etc. However, there are significant contrasts in the contribution to these tools and their use between OHMs, and two surveys conducted in 2017 and 2018 showed that researchers remain poorly informed about Open Science practices. The DRIIHM community is globally motivated by data sharing, but does not know how to proceed and identifies obstacles such as fear of hacking, misuse, security or loss of data ownership.
The objective of this project is to optimize the appropriation of Open Science by the DRIIHM community through: i) the organization of awareness campaigns showing the benefits of data sharing and openness; ii) the co-construction of a more ergonomic and interoperable e-infrastructure, integrating existing tools and accompanying researchers to find, share and (re-)use data through the concrete and gradual implementation of the FAIR principles. This project is part of international initiatives such as the Research Data Alliance and GO FAIR.
This Flash call offers the opportunity to strengthen the collaboration recently initiated with ergonomists and web development specialists to respond more closely to the community health needs and highly improve the existing infrastructure. The methodology is based on an iterative and incremental AGILE software development: the e-infrastructure will be enhanced with new features after each iteration. The originality of this project lies in the co-construction, researchers being involved at the early stages of the project. Challenges are to identify the current practices in data management and data access, and then to manage change with the integration of Open Science practices into the data lifecycle. Training workshops will enable the DRIIHM community to learn how to use and evaluate the new e-infrastructure efficiently. Indicators will be developed to measure the evolution of practices, the usability of the e-infrastructure and the level of data FAIRness.
The impacts of this project will be the directly quantifiable use of the e-infrastructure by the community of data producers and users. As a result, researchers will acquire a better knowledge of Open Science and their datasets will gain in visibility. They will be aware of data management using a Data Management Plan model and will have the opportunity to generate a data paper draft. The e-infrastructure source codes will be freely accessible and maintained on a dedicated repository platform. The scientific production will be open access and referenced in HAL. The methodological solutions developed and tested in this is project can be exploited beyond the LabEx DRIIHM. Finally, through the implementation of interoperability, research data will be visible in major national and international data infrastructures including the future European Open Science Cloud portal.