From Place to Planet: Organizing Research by Place

Field stations are essential place-based knowledge stewards, supporting research and observations over time. In collaboration with field stations, we have developed a new publishing platform for field science and scholarship, iPlaces. iPlaces applies the familiar publication process for journal articles to data and documentation that is too often overlooked or lost. Crucial hooks for field-based studies, and their downstream outputs, are project applications. 

iPlaces provides tools to review, publish, and create connections along the value chain by publishing field station-supported projects, which form the basis for station-branded journals. iPlaces is built on the Open Science ecosystem. The published projects are citable resources with digital object identifiers (DOIs) and are connected to people and organizations, including the station and funders, through persistent identifiers. iPlaces emphasizes regulatory compliance by linking authorizations (permits) to research outputs, providing a service that also benefits government agencies. In addition to these legal metadata services, iPlaces has integrated Local Contexts, extra-legal infrastructure that empowers Indigenous communities to engage in dialogue with research teams through the iPlaces review, and the addition of biocultural and traditional knowledge notices and labels to field station-supported projects. These social and legal metadata are important for many local communities worldwide and field stations could play an important role in (re)building trust in expert knowledge and data products. 

With the link between the place and the downstream data, the contributions of worldwide marine and field stations are more visible, ethical, locally connected, and globally networked.