FISHNet: Encouraging data sharing and reuse in the freshwater science community

Use the link to access the full text article published in the current issue of the open access Journal of Digital Information.  The abstract reads as follows: “This paper describes the FISHNet project, which developed a repository environment for the curation and sharing of data relating to freshwater science, a discipline whose research community is distributed thinly across a variety of institutions, and usually works in relative isolation as individual researchers or within small groups. As in other ‘small sciences’, these datasets tend to be small and ‘hand-crafted’, created to address particular research questions rather than with a view to reuse, so they are rarely curated effectively, and the potential for sharing and reusing them is limited. The paper addresses a variety of issues and concerns raised by freshwater researchers as regards data sharing, describes our approach to developing a repository environment that addresses these concerns, and identifies the potential impact within the research community of the system.”