From rwaide at lternet.edu Mon Sep 14 15:04:54 2015 From: rwaide at lternet.edu (Robert Waide) Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2015 15:04:54 -0600 Subject: [Macrosystems-projects] Invitation to participate in a proposal Message-ID: <55F73676.90008@lternet.edu> Dear MacroSystems Colleagues, We are writing to invite you to participate in a National effort to create a new pathway to archive data from individual ecological studies into LTER's Provenance Aware Synthesis Tracking Architecture (PASTA) data repository (see attachment). We are in the process of resubmitting a proposal titled "ABI Development: Enabling broad-scale ecological analysis and synthesis through PASTA Plus, the enhanced LTER data repository" to the National Science Foundation in support of an open repository to host data (and metadata) from research projects like yours. As you are well aware, many scientists across the country are concerned that valuable data are being lost because they are not preserved in a persistent and accessible archive, and are therefore not available for present or future comparisons and synthesis. We begin to address this critical need for archiving "dark data" with our proposal (see attached abstract). In the event that funding for this proposal is secured, we invite you to participate in a series of scoping and training workshops to help guide further development of the PASTA software to meet the needs of the MacroSystems community. As part of the project, we include support to bring investigators and students together to facilitate preparation and publication of data in the PASTA framework. Participants in these workshops are invited to become involved with ongoing repository design and improvements. We also plan workshops for students at future national meetings to facilitate using data from the expanded repository. Data from one MacroSystems project are already published in PASTA, and several others are in preparation. Feel free to examine data from one project by searching for "macrosystems" at https://portal.lternet.edu/nis/home.jsp. We received high scores in our previous submission and believe that we are addressing most of the reviewers' concerns in our new proposal. One of the principal criticisms of our last proposal was the absence of evidence of interest from our target communities. To address this concern, we are soliciting letters of cooperation from interested scientists. The attached template for such a letter, in the format required by NSF, should take only a minute to complete. By providing a letter, you are stating your intention to deposit data from your project into PASTA for future generations of scientists to explore and analyze. You will receive a Digital Object Identifier for each contributed data set, which will allow attribution for any data that is used in future projects, including synthesis and or journal publications. You will also be able to use the DOI to cite your data in your own publications. By putting your data into the PASTA repository, you will fulfill the requirement of many journals to archive data supporting manuscripts in a public archive. Because the PASTA repository is also a DataONE node, your data will also be accessible through the DataONE and ONEMercury data portals. Perhaps the greatest benefit of supporting this project is the assurance that your data will be preserved in an open repository and made discoverable to a broad community of like minded scientists. If you decide to participate, please fill out, sign, and return the attached template to me (rwaide at lternet.edu) no later than Friday, 18 September 2015. NSF requires the exact wording in the template, so please do not make any changes to the body of the letter. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you for considering participation in this project. Sincerely, Dr. Robert Waide (Co-PI) Dept. of Biology University of New Mexico rwaide at lternet.edu Dr. Mark Servilla (PI) Dept. of Biology University of New Mexico servilla at lternet.edu -- Robert B. Waide Executive Director Long Term Ecological Research Network Office MSC03 2020 1 University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001 Phone: 505/277-2649 Fax: 505/277-2541 ResearcherID: F-5304-2010 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Abstract draft.docx Type: application/x-zip-compressed Size: 13374 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Letter of cooperation template.docx Type: application/x-zip-compressed Size: 11965 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: NIS-PASTA description.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 821897 bytes Desc: not available URL: