For the next month, the cit-sci team and I will be working on an article for the PLOS community page, which publishes short articles of interest to the scientific community. We have been thinking a lot about how to make metadata documentation more user friendly and about how to make citizen science data more visible to the scientific community. In our article, we will be outlining what we see as barriers to citizen science data re-use and discovery and presenting potential solutions available through cit-sci.org to overcome those obstacles.
We are also beginning to explore how to export cit-sci.org data onto GBIF repositories. Members of Vertnet have been very helpful in relaying their own experiences with this process. Of course, before we can begin publishing citizen science data, we will mount an educational campaign with cit-sci.org users to ensure that everyone understands the benefits of open data. Our long-term goal is for all data (minus the sensitive datasets) to be openly searchable and available via DataONE search tools. Stay tuned to follow our progress.