[Macrosystems-projects] Invitation to participate in a proposal

[Robert Waide]

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


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