Collaborative Research: Explaining Differential Success in Biodiversity Knowledge Commons

科学家越来越依赖社区管理的数字门户来存储和访问开放数据。虽然这些数字门户网站改善了对数据和其他科学产品的访问，但门户网站的实施成本高昂，维护具有挑战性，而且往往无法在关键利益攸关方中得到利用。与那些在数字经济其他领域工作的人一样，科学家们越来越多地采用平台来实施和定制门户网站，以满足特定的社区和需求，这种模式降低了基础设施成本，并实现了跨网络门户的规模效益。然而，从同一平台构建的门户网站显示出其结果的巨大差异。参与任何特定的门户网站往往是短暂的，数据门户网站对科学进程的影响是具有挑战性的评估;门户网站的使用通常无法映射到传统的研究生产力的措施，如出版物和引用计数。该项目是第一个系统地调查从一个共同平台建立的科学数据门户网站，以了解门户网站社区和成果。研究设计比较了生物多样性数据门户，将为其他平台和数字知识共享的研究提供信息，如开源软件和同行生产社区。具体的调查结果和建议将与生物多样性门户网站的利益相关者分享关于有效地设计和使用这些门户网站，以提高摄取和访问这些重要的物种数据，并促进科学和决策周围的环境changes.This项目使用模糊集定性比较分析（fsQCA）分析开放的数据门户网站作为一种知识共享，施加最小的限制访问或重用。研究样本包括从Symbiota平台构建的37个活跃和4个不活跃的生物多样性数据门户，Symbiota平台是最大和最早的科学数据平台之一，仍在持续开发中，有数百个参与生物多样性收集和几十个单独管理的门户。2020年，共生生物门户共提供了超过6000万条生物多样性数据记录的访问权限，并占通过NSF的生物多样性收藏品高级数字化（ADBC）计划数字化的标本访问网络流量的90%，该计划迄今已在该领域投资超过5000万美元。该项目综合了多种类型和来源的定量和定性数据，以确定为什么其中一些门户网站实现了持续增长，而另一些则没有。为此，该项目收集和分析了长达十年的分析和来自门户的其他信息，包括跟踪的使用数据、社区建设活动、门户治理的特征和资源投入，以及在门户网站访问和与门户经理分层抽样访谈期间收集的观察数据。fsQCA方法可以对那些最有可能促进生产和持续成果的门户功能进行比较推断，包括集体利益和建立包容性的科学社区。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Scientists increasingly rely on community-governed digital portals to store and access open data. While these digital portals have improved access to data and other scientificproducts, portals are expensive to implement, challenging to maintain, and often fail to have uptake among key stakeholders. Like those working in other areas of the digital economy, scientists have increasingly adopted platforms to implement and tailor portals to particular communities and needs, a model that lowers infrastructure costs and enables benefits of scale across networked portals. Yet portals built from the same platform nonetheless show a large variation in their outcomes. Participation in any particular portal is often short-lived and the impacts of data portals on the scientific process are challenging to evaluate; portal usage typically fails to map onto traditional measures of research productivity such as publications and citation counts. This project is the first to systematically investigate scientific data portals built from a common platform in order to understand portal communities and outcomes. The research design, which compares biodiversity data portals, will inform studies of other platforms and digital knowledge commons, such as open source software and peer-production communities. Specific findings and recommendations will be shared with biodiversity portal stakeholders regarding the effective design and use of these portals in order to improve uptake and access to these important species data and facilitate science and decision making around environmental change.This project uses fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to analyze open data portals as a kind of knowledge commons that impose minimal restrictions on access or reuse. The study sample comprises the 37 active and 4 inactive biodiversity data portals built from the Symbiota platform, one of the largest and earliest scientific data platforms still under continual development, with hundreds of participating biodiversity collections and several dozen individually managed portals. In 2020, Symbiota portals collectively providedaccess to over 60 million biodiversity data records and accounted for 90% of Web traffic accessing specimens digitized through the NSF’s Advanced Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) program, which has invested over $50 million in this area to date. The project synthesizes across multiple types and sources of quantitative and qualitative data to identify why some of these portals achieve sustained growth and others do not. To do so, the project collects and analyzes up to ten years of analytics and other information from the portals, including tracked usage data, community building activities, features of portal governance, and resource inputs, as well as observation data collected during portal site visits and interviews with a stratified sample of portal managers. The fsQCA approach enables comparative inferences about those portal features most likely to foster productive and sustained outcomes, including collective benefit and building inclusive scientific communities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.