Becoming DataONE Tier-4 Member Node: Steps taken by the Nevada Research Data Center

The Nevada Research Data Center (NRDC) joined up with DataONE by becoming a Member Node to help with their goal of preserving and sharing scientific data. The NRDC is an NSF funded data management center for several climate based research groups across Nevada. DataONE is a collaboration that seeks to conserve scientific data and make researching global ecological issues easier. We brought our Member Node up to Tier 4, which allows us to make replication of other Member Nodes' data for safekeeping. By becoming a Member Node with DataONE, we expect that the projects supported by NRDC will have higher visibility, for the benefit of interested researchers and data users everywhere, who will have straightforward access to the many existing NRDC datasets (currently totaling over 2.1 billion of environmental data measurements). In this paper, we first describe the DataONE model of linked data repositories and then provide details of the configuration and development steps performed to fulfill the requirements of becoming Tier 4 (maximum possible) Member Node with DataONE. The significance of this work is also briefly discussed in the paper, and planned directions of future work are outlined.