B2SHARE: An Open eScience Data Sharing Platform

Abstract

Scientific data sharing is becoming an essential service for data driven science and can significantly improve the scientific process by making reliable, and trustworthy data available. Thereby reducing redundant work, and providing insights on related research and recent advancements. For data sharing services to be useful in the scientific process, they need to fulfill a number of requirements that cover not only discovery, and access to data. But to ensure the integrity, and reliability of published data as well. B2SHARE, developed by the EUDAT project, provides such a data sharing service to scientific communities. For communities that wish to download, install and maintain their own service, it is also available as software. B2SHARE is developed with a focus on user-friendliness, reliability, and trustworthiness, and can be customized for different organizations and use-cases. In this paper we discuss the design, architecture, and implementation of B2SHARE. We show its usefulness in the scientific process with some case studies in the biodiversity field.