E-Content [All Things Digital]
Five New Paradigms for Science
and an Introduction to DataONE
W
e are entering a new era of science and scholar-
ship. At least five paradigm shifts are driving
many of the emerging trends associated with
this new era. First, grand challenge ques-
tions are increasingly dominating the scientific
research agenda. The National Science Foundation (NSF) budget,
for example, designates significant funding for challenging prob-
lems including clean energy research; science, engineering, and
education for sustainability; and creating cyberinfrastructure for
the 21st century.1 NSF has invested heavily in telescopes, gravita-
tional observatories, and other community instruments for the
astronomy and physics communities. The term big science is
often used to refer to the use of these community-based infra-
structure platforms that engage large, interdisciplinary teams of
scientists in addressing extremely complex and challenging ques-
tions. The biological sciences and geosciences are now seeing sim-
ilar investments in community infrastructure such as EarthScope
(http://www.earthscope.org/), the Ocean Observatories Initiative
(http://www.oceanobservatories.org/), and the National Ecologi-
cal Observatory Network (http://www.neoninc.org/). Thus, in this
new era, big science extends to all research domains.
Second, data are now being viewed as valuable products of the
scientific enterprise, as evidenced by the requirements for data-
management plans by the National Institutes of Health and NSF.2
This represents a major departure from the past, when project
success was judged almost entirely by the number of publications
and number of students supported.
Third, libraries are going virtual and are becoming the new
eras repositories for knowledge, information, and data. Increas-
ingly, books are shelved on moveable stacks, freeing up space for
new collaboration spaces, as well as computing and visualization
hardware. One consequence of this change is the move toward
digital content collections that are readily accessible via the web,
enabling even small libraries to develop and make accessible valu-
able digital material as part of curated collections.
Fourth, data-intensive science has been characterized as the
fourth research paradigm, following on the heels of experimen-
tation, theory, and computer simulation.3 It is now possible, for
example, to perform dynamic simulations with sensor networks
providing real-time data that are used to update models and fore-
casts on-the-fly.
Fifth, with the emergence of data-intensive science, it can be
argued that data management has become the new statistics,
meaning that students now need to be trained in all aspects of
the data life cycle so that they can proficiently manage massive
volumes of complex data and use new analytical and visualization
tools to interpret underlying patterns and processes.
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Associated Challenges
The five paradigm shifts described above have created a need
for new information infrastructure and research approaches.
This is exemplified in the environmental sciences, where
the scope and nature of biological, environmental, and earth
sciences research are evolving in response to environmental
challenges such as global climate change, invasive species,
and emergent diseases. Scientific studies, as a consequence,
are increasingly focusing on long-term, broad-scale, and
complex questions. Large volumes of diverse data collected
by remote-sensing platforms and embedded environmental
sensor networks via collaborative, interdisciplinary science
teams are required to address such questions. In addition, new
approaches are necessary for managing, preserving, analyzing,
and sharing the diverse array of data.
We face several challenges as we move into this new era
of grand challenge science and scholarship. First, big science
and the digital makeover of libraries require substantial fund-
ing, which has been difficult to realize in recent times when
research sponsors and university systems have been financially
strapped.
Second, numerous informatics-related challenges compli-
cate the picture. In a recent survey of environmental scientists,
Carol Tenopir and her colleagues ascertained that more than 80
percent of the respondents agreed that they would be willing
to share data across a broad group of researchers who use data
in different ways.4 However, a majority of respondents also
noted that they experienced difficulties in doing so because
of the absence of formal established processes to store data
beyond the project, inadequate tools and support for data
management during the life of the project, and the poor state
of existing tools for preparing documentation. These chal-
lenges are amplified by the fact that most data sets reside in
hard-to-discover data silos, including individual laptop and
desktop computers, institutional repositories, and even large
data centers that may not be readily accessible to the interested
scientist. Hence, I postulate that science is presently hindered
by the 80:20 problemthat is, 80 percent of a scientists effort
is spent discovering, acquiring, documenting, transforming,
and integrating data, whereas only 20 percent of the effort is
devoted to more intellectually stimulating pursuits such as
analysis, visualization, and making new discoveries. New IT
solutions are clearly needed.
New Solutions to the Informatics Challenges
The DataNet program at NSF was created to catalyze the
development of a system of science and engineering data col-
E-Content Department Editor: Kevin M. Guthrie

lections that is open, extensible and evolvable. 5 To date, five
DataNet awards have been made, three of them in late 2011;
the two earlier awards (in 2009) went to DataONE (University
of New Mexico) and the Data Conservancy (Johns Hopkins
University). To focus on one example, DataONE (https://www
.dataone.org/) was designed to provide an underlying informa-
tion infrastructure that facilitates data preservation and reuse
for research with a principal focus on the biological, environ-
mental, and earth sciences. DataONE, which stands for Data
Observation Network for Earth, supports rapid data discovery
and access across diverse data centers distributed worldwide
and will provide scientists with an integrated set of familiar
tools that support all elements of the data life cycle (e.g., from
data-managementplanning and acquisition through data inte-
gration, analysis, and visualization).
The cyberinfrastructure implemented by DataONE com-
prises three principal components: Member Nodes, Coordinat-
ing Nodes, and an Investigator Toolkit. Member Nodes include
existing or new data repositories that install the DataONE
Member Node application programming interfaces (APIs).
Member Nodes encompass natural history collections, earth-
observing institutions, research projects and networks, librar-
ies, universities, and governmental and nongovernmental
organizations. Each Member Node acquires and maintains data
and frequently provides value-added support services (e.g.,
user help desk, visualization services) to a particular commu-
nity of users.
Coordinating Nodes are designed to be tightly coordinated,
stable platforms providing network-wide services to Member
Nodes. They are responsible for cataloging content, managing
replication of content, providing search and discovery mecha-
nisms, managing access-control rules, and mapping identities
among different identity providers. Three initial Coordinating
Nodes are located at Oak Ridge Campus (a consortium com-
prising Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of
Tennessee), the University of California, Santa Barbara, and
the University of New Mexico. Coordinating Nodes maintain
the integrity of the DataONE federation by ensuring sufficient
replicas are made of digital objects (e.g., data plus associated
metadata) to facilitate long-term preservation and by tracking
those replicas to enable the identification of specific Member
Nodes where the content can be retrieved. The Coordinating
Node indexing services, in essence, provide a system-wide
search mechanism enabling users to discover relevant content
from all participating Member Nodes.
The Investigator Toolkit is a modular set of software and
plug-ins that enables interaction with DataONE infrastructure
through commonly used analysis and data-management tools.
Components in the Investigator Toolkit include low-level soft-
ware libraries intended for developers and more technically
inclined investigators, desktop application plug-ins like the R
Project for Statistical Computing (http://www.r-project.org/),
and operating system extensions such as file system drivers that
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B y W i l l ia m Mic h e n e r
expose DataONE as essentially a large network drive. The over-
arching goal of the Investigator Toolkit is to provide seamless
interaction with the DataONE cyberinfrastructure for storing,
retrieving, discovering, and visualizing data.
Ushering in the New Era
Innovative cyberinfrastructure platforms, a re-envisioning
of the librarys role in support of scholarship, and scientific
approaches that place high value on data stewardship are
needed to resolve the numerous grand challenges faced by
scientists and society. Platforms like DataONE and tools that
reduce the amount of time scientists spend focusing on more
mundane data-management activities are expected to signifi-
cantly advance the nature and pace of science.
The new era of grand challenge science and scholarship
offers significant potential to advance our state of knowledge,
transform academia, and benefit society. Three specific actions
can advance this transition. First, we need to promote this change
by embracing interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, collaborative,
and data-intensive science. This requires lobbying for the nec-
essary funding and providing support and recognition to those
individuals who choose to join teams in addressing grand chal-
lenge problems. Second, we need to educate future generations
of scientists by inculcating informatics throughout domain
curricula, not just in the computer and information sciences.
Third, we need to advocate for change with a focus on break-
ing down data, academic, and funding silos so that adequately
funded, interdisciplinary teams of scientists are poised to tackle
the grand challenges. n
Notes
1. NSF Presents Presidents Fiscal Year 2012 Budget Request of $7.76 Billion,
press release, February 14, 2011, <http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ
.jsp?cntn_id=118642>.
2. NIH Data Sharing Policy and Implementation Guidance: <http://grants
.nih.gov/grants/policy/data_sharing/data_sharing_guidance.htm>; NSF
Dissemination and Sharing of Research Results: <http://www.nsf.gov/bfa/
dias/policy/dmp.jsp>.
3. Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Tolle, eds., The Fourth Paradigm: Data-
Intensive Scientific Discovery (Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Research, 2009),
<http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/>.
4. Carol Tenopir, Suzie Allard, Kimberly Douglass, Arsev Umur Aydinoglu,
Lei Wu, et al., Data Sharing by Scientists: Practices and Perceptions, PLoS
ONE, vol. 6, no. 6 (June 2011), pp. 121, <http://www.plosone.org/article/
info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0021101>.
5. National Science Foundation, Office of Cyberinfrastructure, Directorate for
Computer & Information Science & Engineering, Sustainable Digital Data
Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet), <http://www.nsf.gov/
pubs/2007/nsf07601/nsf07601.htm>.
William Michener (wmichene@unm.edu) is Professor and Director of
e-Science Initiatives for University Libraries at the University of New
Mexico. He is Project Director for Data Observation Network for Earth
(DataONE) and is involved in research related to sustainability of
cyberinfrastructure, development of federated data systems, and
community engagement and education.
2012 William Michener. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
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