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Publishing Research Data of a Dust Storm on Mars

By WashU Libraries

WashU Libraries support WashU faculty and researchers in sharing research data outputs via our research data repository. Each submitter to WashU Research Data (WURD) receives a comprehensive review before publication, a unique digital object identifier (DOI) for their data, robust metadata and documentation, on a platform that meets federal, publisher, and community requirements and standards.

Alian Wang, research professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, submitted our most recent published dataset. The dataset is titled “Isotope effects (Cl, O, C) of heterogeneous electrochemistry induced by Martian dust activities.”

Wang’s research group uses a device called the Planetary Environment and Analysis Chamber, or PEACh, to simulate the heat, pressure, and atmospheric conditions of the surface of Mars during one of the dust storms common on the planet. The results of these experiments are careful measurements of the products of chemical reactions that take place in the chamber, and they help to explain why the soil of Mars is unusually high in perchlorates (chlorine-containing salts).

What happened after the dataset was submitted to WURD?

Curator Assigned: The dataset was assigned to a curator—a curator is a professional reviewer trained to evaluate a dataset’s ability to meet federal guidelines and FAIR principles. FAIR means the data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. WashU has three data curators with a wide range of functional and subject expertise. However, we also lean on the methods, workflows, and expertise of the Data Curation Network, which currently includes more than 22 institutions, such as Duke, NYU, Cornell, Penn, and Johns Hopkins.

Check the health of the dataset: The curator closely reviewed the dataset; in this case, the curator for Wang’s data set was Ryan Wallace, who:

  • Checked it to make sure that the files opened, were well formatted, and well documented
  • Collaborated with Wang to fix any issues and improve documentation
  • Enhanced the metadata to make the file more discoverable
  • Guided file transformation to support interoperability for reuse (e.g., Excel files to .csv or Word to .txt); both the original and interoperable formats are included.

Once Wang and Wallace completed the review and updates, the curated data was evaluated for FAIRness, which determines how Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable it is. Once the FAIRness evaluation is complete, the final step is publishing the dataset.

The Mars soil dataset can be viewed on WashU Research Data.