Accelerating the adoption of (meta)data standards for environmental health science research data

Dr. Rance Nault, Biochemistry, Michigan State University

Funding agencies, publishers, and other stakeholders have made the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles a cornerstone of their data management and sharing requirements to increase rigor, reproducibility, and accountability. Accomplishing these goals will require significant cultural shifts surrounding data management and the development of robust and reliable resources that bridge the technical challenges and gaps in expertise. The MSU Superfund Research Center (SRC) Data Management and Analysis Core (DMAC) aims to tackle those challenges by developing and implementing strategies to support standardized collection of metadata essential for the interoperability and reuse of environmental health science (EHS) research data. This seminar will review the current state of metadata and EHS data in public repositories and highlight the major limitations. I will then introduce the MSU SRC DMAC approach to address these limitations using a multi-institution effort to develop the Minimum Information about Animal Toxicology Experiments (MIATE) standard as a case study. The case study will demonstrate how MIATE, and associated resources, promote the collection and sharing of FAIR EHS data by not only outlining the expectations and vocabulary, but also leveraging established tools to collect, organize, and share (meta)data in machine-readable formats. Collectively, these efforts will demonstrate a putative framework to address these challenges more broadly for disparate data types.