The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative Information and Data Cooperative (GRIIDC) is a data management system that provides researchers with a variety of tools to help manage data throughout the lifecycle of a project. GRIIDC was developed to fulfill the requirement that all Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) funded researchers make their data publicly available. After seven years of operation and over 1,900 datasets available for download, GRIIDC has encountered many challenges, including data organization issues, researchers’ varied experience with technology, and hesitance to share data. In 2016, GRIIDC began hosting training webinars to help researchers navigate the system, submit quality data and metadata, and provide data organization best practices. As the quality of data and metadata improved, GRIIDC determined that these webinars could mitigate previous issues. In 2017, the GoMRI data policy was updated requiring that each newly funded research consortium or individual investigator complete three training sessions within specific dates of their grant agreement. The training sessions included an introduction to the GoMRI data management program, organizing data – best practices and GRIIDC submission, and how to submit data to GRIIDC. The training sessions were offered by webinar and as workshops presented at the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill & Ecosystem Science conference. After hosting over 50 webinars, offering six workshops, and training 260 researchers, GRIIDC encountered a few issues with the required training including having to schedule individual webinars to accommodate researcher’s schedules, low attention rates, and diverse attitudes and experiences sharing data. Improvements were identified such as using software to track presentation views, making webinars more interactive, hosting additional in-person workshops, requiring a quiz at the end of the training, and allowing researchers the ability to test out of training. Even with the issues identified, GRIIDC is hopeful that the training will help researchers provide quality data submissions not only for the remaining GoMRI projects but for data they will generate in the future.

The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative Information and Data Cooperative (GRIIDC) is a multidisciplinary data repository created as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Essentially “building a ship while sailing”, GRIIDC developed a repository while researchers were collecting vital post-spill data during a time when data sharing was not a widely accepted practice. Priorities for the data repository during those early years focused on ingesting data and metadata quickly, while working with researchers who had never shared data before. Almost ten years later, GRIIDC has come a long way – improving data curation, training researchers, and developing software that greatly simplified the submission process. While the ease of submission will always be a priority, GRIIDC has shifted the focus of software development and data curation to implement FAIR data principles, which ensure that data are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The data package review process has improved by increasing the number of subject matter experts who ensure that files are not corrupt, are in non-proprietary formats, contain complete datasets, and are well-documented with ISO-19115-2 metadata. Datasets are assigned a digital object identifier (DOI) and can be searched using GRIIDC’s data discovery tool. GRIIDC is a DataONE member node and is listed in the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data), which increases findability and accessibility of data. Datasets have landing pages which display the DOI, links to associated publications, number of downloads, and a suggested citation. Although the GRIIDC data management system currently supports several FAIR data principles, there is always room for improvement. Potential future tasks include adding vocabularies, improving provenance records, and adding additional attributes to metadata. Challenges to accomplishing these goals include funding, limited resources, and program priorities. Despite these challenges, GRIIDC will always continue to evolve to improve the needs of users as well as support the FAIR data movement. Life may not always be fair, but data should be.