The Specialised Information Service for Geosciences (FID GEO): Supporting Open Access Publications for the Geosciences Community in Germany

Abstract

The shift towards Open Science practices is increasingly demanded by science policy. The transition to Open Access for text publications goes hand in hand with a growing demand to make data, scientific software and samples, freely and FAIRly available to the general public. A persistent problem here is the clear and permanent accessibility and re-usability of scientific publications. This development affects both the scientific publication culture as well as the information infrastructures and poses major challenges to the German- based geosciences community. The specialized information service for geosciences (FID GEO) is a service funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and supports the cultural change towards Open Access publications. Hereby, FID GEO pursues a holistic approach to Open Science, including scientific literature, data, samples, and scientific software, and aims to promote their interconnection. FID GEO actively provides data and text publishing services through the affiliated repositories GFZ Data Services and GEO-LEOe-docs, as well as an on-demand digitization service of printed geoscientific literature and maps. The focus here is on the services and information systems that ensure permanently available and reliably citable publications of writings and data. Specifically, the service for text publications is provided in the FID GEOs own subject repository GEO-LEOe- docs. The affiliated research data repository GFZ Data Services is available for the publication of research data and scientific software from the earth and environmental sciences. In addition, FID GEO aims to comprehensively inform the German-based geoscientific community about Open Science and FAIR data by bringing the discussions to the individual disciplines through various communication channels. To strengthen the open information culture in the geosciences, FID GEO collaborates with strategic (inter)national initiatives such as NFDI4Earth, COPDESS and OneGeochemistry.