Data Dryad, in conjunction with the National Agricultural Library (NAL), is applying for the Institute of Museum and Library Service’s Sparks! Ignition Grant for Libraries.

In response to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum, “Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research” the US Department of Agriculture released its “Implementation Plan to Increase Public Access to Results of USDA-funded Scientific Research”. It calls for all USDA-funded research projects to make their publications freely available to the public within one year of publication. Assigning dataset DOIs and making them directly citable.
Making the data directly accessible will support emerging uses for data, such as big data and linked open data applications.

Building on a shared vision to improve science. Launch a prototype of ADC. Data Dryad is a nonprofit, open access repository for data underlying international scientific and medical literature. We currently host over 30,000 data files, which demonstrates the demand for our model. Our mission is to increase access to, and re-use of, scientific data. USDA is the largest funder or Ag data, so has a responsibility to make it accessible.

We are seeking $13,800 in funding to launch a prototype an open access digital repository for scientific datasets, called Ag Data Commons. Data Dryad will contract one of our internal experts to consult with KSD and provide project oversight for a period of 25 weeks, working 16 hours/week, at the rate of $30/hour. We will recruit a consultant from Data Dryad, who will function as a business analyst and technical specialist. That is, she will provide coherent oversight to build a vision for the project within KSD. She will execute the above timeline for the project, assign tasks, convene meetings, and report progress to NAL management.

The National Agricultural Library has agreed to pay all other costs associated with this project, contingent upon the award of seed grant money. If that contingency is met, NAL will re-allocate time and labor from their existing organizational resources (staff, office space, technical software and hardware) to build, launch, and maintain Ag Data Commons. Our grant proposal solely addresses the hiring of an external consultant to initiate a novel collaboration, and implement an emerging way to share open data.

For example, invasive species, diseases, and pests affecting livestock or plants will do exponentially more damage to a subsistence farmer in rural Nigeria than a monocropper in Iowa. In the former example, such incidents can lead to death; however, if local scientists had access to the wealth of research produced in the West, or at the local University down the street, such extreme consequences might be avoided. Local universities could build on research conducted elsewhere, and apply learned methods to local problems, producing tangible results.

Metadata is an integral part of this project; it is not sufficient to post raw data alone on the web. Taking time to richly describe data is where value is added, so that they may be better understood, and more intelligently re-used. We suggest using ISO 19115 as the metadata schema. It supports geospatial data, so location tagging will be enabled, which will better facilitate discoverability. Because ISO is an international standard, there will also be increased opportunity for data sharing and interoperability. Ag Data Commons itself will use the Fedora operating system.