A recent comment by Stall et al., in Nature urges all scientific disciplines to follow the Geosciences and demand best practices for publishing and data sharing. The comment highlights the efforts of the Geoscience community to elevate the value of data by making it more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). One key example is the shift of many Earth-science journals to no longer listing data in supplementary information, and instead requiring that data be made available in FAIR repositories. In addition to making data easier to re-use, repositories provide “persistent identifiers, curation expertise, landing pages, and support for the citation of data in papers”. Stall et al. specifically highlight EarthChem and its efforts to make data FAIR: “… data sets in the EarthChem Library at the Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance are easily found through Google Dataset Search. Data are straightforward to download from a landing page. Data-set formats are aligned with other geochemical, petrological and geochronological data. And they have a long useful life because of their rich metadata on provenance.”

To shift research culture across all scientific disciplines the authors call for three changes: 1) Make depositing open and FAIR data a priority for all, 2) Recognize and incentivize FAIR data practices, 3) Fund global infrastructure to support FAIR data and tools. Click here to read the full Nature comment by Shelley Stall, Lynn Yarmey, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Brooks Hanson, Kerstin Lehnert, Brian Nosek, Mark Parsons, Erin Robinson & Lesley Wyborn. To learn more about the EarthChem Library or to submit your dataset please click here.