CRESCYNT is designed to benefit coral reef scientists at every career stage.
Early – If you’re a graduate student, postdoc, or early career scientist, you need the tools and resources that CRESCYNT is working in partnership with EarthCube to see developed. The coming data standards and technologies will be a basic requirement of all your work to come. Extra perk: Additional technical skills make you a better team member and allow you to offer more to potential employers (plus you know only too well that keeping up with constantly changing technology is a hamster wheel – best to pick up skills you care about).
Mid – Funding agencies and journals are increasingly requiring more open data, more transparent processes, and better data management, from metadata to backup to repositories to access. The ability to share and re-use data means more potential collaborators and a more efficient and productive lab. Extra perk: You’ve worked hard to develop practical workflows and good quality data; by documenting your efforts in a standard, shareable, and potentially public way (when you’re ready), you earn credit for all of your research output, not only publications, and are more likely to gain additional citations, collaborators, and maybe even minions.
Late – This is Estate Planning For Your Data! Your research is a professional legacy – make your data and your work discoverable and reusable for many years into the future! For coral reef work in particular, the data and images you’ve captured represent a unique intersection of space, time, and process that will never occur again in the universe. Extra perk: Immortality (of a sort), continuing to contribute to coral reef understanding and protection long into the future, and the amplification of your work through the power of indirect effects – dropping your solid research pebble into the water and allowing others to benefit from its ripple effect makes your work matter even more.
“Hypotheses come and go but data remain.” – Ramon y Cajal
Join CRESCYNT today and become part of these positive feedback loops!
Learn more at crescynt.org.
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Longer quotation: “…a scholar’s positive contribution is measured by the sum of the original data that he contributes. Hypotheses come and go but data remain. Theories desert us, while data defend us. They are our true resources, our real estate, and our best pedigree. In the eternal shifting of things, only they will save us from the ravages of time and from the forgetfulness or injustice of men. To risk everything on the success of one idea is to forget that every fifteen or twenty years theories are replaced or revised.”
– Santiago Ramon y Cajal, from Advice for a Young Investigator.
>>>Go to the blog Masterpost or the CRESCYNT website or NSF EarthCube.<<<
Coral Reef Science & Cyberinfrastructure Network 