Roles And Responsibilities

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Statement of purpose

The US Academic Research Fleet (ARF) routinely collects a suite of oceanographic, geophysical, meteorological, and navigational data. These data are acquired regardless of the science mission of the expedition, providing baseline measurements of environmental parameters in the global oceans. These data are of high value for building global syntheses and historical time series of ocean properties and can support a wide range of current and future research goals. The Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R) program works in collaboration with marine operators and chief scientists, as well as the NOAA national data archives, to ensure these data are preserved and made accessible as a community resource for broad use now and into the future. All parties are essential in ensuring effective data management and can do so best with a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities to support this collaboration. This document outlines R2R’s vision of how the R2R program, Research Vessel (RV) data managers, and Chief Scientists work together to support the management and preservation of underway environmental data acquired with the US academic research fleet.

"Underway data" refers to instrumentation that is usually permanently installed on the vessel and managed by operators, and may include ADCP, CTD, expendable probe, fluoro/transmissometer, gravimeter, magnetometer, meteorological station, multibeam, navigation, pCO2, singlebeam/sub-bottom, TSG, timeserver, and wave radar.

Motivation

R2R relies on receiving accurate, complete cruise data distributions and complete metadata to ensure that all underway data from all ARF cruises are preserved. The volume and complexity of cruise distributions is such that the process for identifying and extracting datasets from a cruise distribution must be largely automated. R2R relies on an up-to-date inventory of devices deployed, a documented directory structure, known file formats, and file naming protocols for each vessel in order to extract or “break out” datasets by device type. Without these, R2R cannot ensure all data are preserved and appropriately documented for use.

Vessel Operator’s Roles and Responsibilities

R2R relies on the Operator’s Data Manager(s) for each cruise for the following activities:

Collecting routine underway data and existing supporting information (e.g. metadata, calibration information) useful for properly analyzing the data, in line with community best practices where available and tractable.
Providing complete data and supporting metadata and documentation from every cruise to R2R as soon after the cruise as tractable, in a consistent cruise directory structure, excepting cruises where the data are classified or restricted such that they should never become public.
Providing complete cruise metadata in the Marine Facility Planning system. If the operator does not use the MFP, they are responsible for contacting R2R for further guidance.. R2R asks in particular that vessel data managers do not change cruise identifiers (i.e. cruise codes such as RR1808) once data or metadata related to that cruise have been provided to R2R. R2R uses cruise identifiers to uniquely identify cruises throughout its workflow, and Cruise ID changes require substantial effort. Furthermore, once data have been published on R2R or NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Informatics (NCEI) and downloaded, there is no way to alert downloaders to the change. The Cruise ID is a critical persistent identifier embedded in workflows and metadata to relate data taken from the same cruise, and must be reliable.
Participating in regular vessel profile reviews with R2R staff. Alerting R2R to any changes over the operational year in vessel scientific devices, directory structures for data and documentation, file formats or file naming patterns, either by updating the R2R Vessel Profile or contacting info@rvdata.us. If data are missing from a cruise distribution, R2R will not know to look elsewhere or request those data, and they may not be preserved.
Ensuring, along with Chief Scientists, that inappropriate content for long-term preservation within national archives is not included in the cruise distribution (e.g. Personally Identifiable Information, copyrighted files).
Providing data files in a documented format and following R2R Recommended Best Practices when possible.

If R2R cannot appropriately manage or describe data due to unprovided data, missing metadata, unclear formats, or undocumented changes to devices or file structures, R2R will reach out to the operator to work to resolve the issue. If the operator is unresponsive, in consultation with the appropriate funding agency the data will be preserved in a dark archive but not made public.

Chief Scientist’s Roles and Responsibilities

R2R relies on the Chief Scientist of each cruise for the following activities:

Responding in a timely manner to the R2R request to indicate their permission to release data for public access, or their proprietary hold. Unreleased data will be deep archived but not publicly released by R2R for 2 years post acquisition, with the exception of navigation/operations data such as GNSS/INS, gyrocompass, speedlog, and winch logs, which are released by R2R immediately. Consistent with current data policies for most federally funded research (e.g. NSF and NOAA), all other data will be released after 2 years unless the Chief Scientist notifies R2R that there is a special consideration that warrants continued proprietary hold. Releasing the data gives R2R the rights to copy, transform, and store the items, as well as provide access to them, under Creative Commons 0.
Managing science party data – i.e. data collected by instruments that are not part of the routine underway instrumentation, or processed versions of data made from the underway data. Ensuring that these data are well described, and submitted to an appropriate long-term repository is the responsibility of the Chief Scientists and their designees (see For Chief Scientists for more information including lists of existing disciplinary data centers).
Ensuring, along with Operators, that only content appropriate for long-term preservation within national archives be included in the cruise distribution (e.g. no Personally Identifiable Information, no copyrighted files, no photos of identifiable people).
Although not required, we strongly encourage scientists to submit any scientific and technical cruise reports generated for their programs to R2R for long term preservation. Cruise reports are valuable resources that support proper interpretation and understanding of data acquired during an expedition and greatly enhance the value of the acquired data for future reuse. Cruise reports are served through the R2R Cruise Catalog with publication DOIs to support proper citation.

R2R’s Roles and Responsibilities

R2R is committed to the following activities:

Receiving cruise distributions for the underway environmental sensor suite from operators.
Ensuring that complete, as-received cruise data distributions are archived for long-term preservation, in collaboration with the NCEI.
Sending and managing data release requests to chief scientists.
Providing the R2R Cruise Catalog as a central resource with cruise DOIs and cruise landing pages that aggregate data resources and information about ARF expeditions. Cruise DOIs provide citable persistent identifiers for expeditions that support the linking of information from a cruise across data systems and scientific publications.
For select underway devices/data types: 1) extracting datasets by device type from the cruise distribution; 2) creating standard documentation, and 3) submitting the raw (as-received) data to NCEI for discovery, access, and archive, for those data types NCEI currently accepts¹. The current list of sensor types that are broken out of the cruise distribution can be found in the R2R device list².
For select devices/data types, performing quality assessment/quality control, and/or creating standard products which are served through the R2R Cruise Catalog and submitted to NCEI for discovery, access, and archive. Currently, QA and standard products are created for meteorological data, navigation, singlebeam (KEB format datasets), thermosalinograph, gravity, magnetics, and CTD; and QA is additionally run on multibeam and XBT.
Providing a publically accessible search interface to the R2R Cruise Catalog for cruise data discovery and access.

^{1. At the time of writing NCEI was accepting ADCP, CTD, expendable probe (e.g. XBT), GNSS, gravimeter, INS, magnetometer, meteorological station, multibeam sonar, singlebeam sonar, splitbeam sonar.↩}
^{2. At the time of writing this included: ADCP, anemometer, barometer, CTD, expendable probe (e.g. XBT), flowmeter, fluorometer, GNSS, gravimeter, gyrocompass, HDSS, hygrometer, INS, magnetometer, meteorological station, multibeam sonar, oxygen sensor, pCO2, pH, PTU, radiometer, rain gauge, singlebeam sonar, speed log, splitbeam sonar, sound velocity profiler (SSV), thermometer (water), time server, transmissometer, thermosalinograph (TSG), and winch.↩}

VESSELS

50 RESEARCH CRUISES

10,087

DATA SETS ARCHIVED

61,499

DOWNLOADABLE FILES

23,879,223

SUPPORTED BY

Research Vessel Data Management: Roles and Responsibilities