Facilitating Data Stewardship with Partnerships for Data Innovations

Agricultural research innovation requires a profound shift in data management to seize upon the potential of the Digital Age. A new commentary in Agricultural & Environmental Letters discusses how the USDA-ARS is working to achieve this transformation from within with its Partnerships for Data Innovations (PDI). Established in 2019, PDI commits to data stewardship at all stages of the research enterprise. This includes data collection and quality assurance/control (QA/QC), processing and analysis, storage, transfer, visualization, and maintenance. Congruent with this change of culture is a new paradigm that views data stewardship as a fundamental scientific responsibility: one that ensures data, especially when publicly funded, are shared for the broader common good, and one that embraces the multiplicative ability of shared data and technology.

To make its digital solutions available to researchers, PDI uses a “Digital Research Workbench” within the ARS’s Agricultural Collaborative Research Outcomes System (AgCROS) infrastructure. The Workbench is designed to complement and fully leverage state-of-the-art networked USDA and ARS computing resources. Together with collaborators and private partners, PDI is committed to accelerating research innovation through the cultural change toward data stewardship.