International Community Guidelines for Sharing and Reusing Quality Information of Individual Earth Science Datasets

Under the auspices of the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) and with collaboration among members of the ESIP Information Quality Cluster (IQC), the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) Evaluation and Quality Control (EQC) team, and the Australia/New Zealand Data Quality Interest Group (AU/NZ DQIG), a community effort has been undertaken by international Earth Science domain experts. The objective of this effort is to develop global community guidelines with practical recommendations to promote the representation, sharing and reuse of quality information at the dataset level, leveraging the experiences and expertise of a team of interdisciplinary domain experts and community best practices. The community guidelines are inspired by the guiding principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR) and aim to help stakeholders such as science data centers, repositories, data producers and publishers, data managers and stewards, etc., i) to capture, describe, and represent quality information of their datasets in a way that is in line with the FAIR guiding principles; ii) to allow for the maximum discovery, trust, sharing, reuse and value of their datasets; and iii) to enable global access to and integration of dataset quality information. The vision of developing these guidelines is to promote the creation and use of freely and openly shared dataset quality information that is consistently described, readily available in community standardized formats, and capable of being integrated across commonly-used Earth science systems and tools for search and access with explicitly expressed usage licenses.