EPOS Multi-scale laboratories: a network of European laboratories

Multi-scale laboratories (MSL) represent a community of European solid Earth sciences laboratories including high temperature and pressure experimental facilities, rock physics, analogue tectonic and geodynamic modelling, paleomagnetism, and geochemical and other analytical and microscopy laboratories that have been formed within EPOS, the European Plate Observing System within the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). Laboratory facilities are an integral part of Earth science research. The diversity of methods employed in such infrastructures reflects the multi-scale nature of the Earth system and is essential for the understanding of its evolution, for the assessment of geo-hazards and for the sustainable exploitation of geo-resources. Experimental and analytical data from these laboratories often provide the backbone for scientific publications, but are often available only as supplementary information to research articles. Moreover, much of the collected data remain unpublished, inaccessible, and often not preserved for the long term. MSL are committed to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). This includes the development or adoption of data and metadata standards for the different subdomains and the DOI-referenced data publication as best practice for data sharing that are accessible via the EPOS - Multi-scale laboratories data catalogue (https://epos-msl.uu.nl/). The MSL strategy promotes the collaboration with existing international databases (e.g., MagIC for paleomagnetic data and EarthChem for geochemical data) and scientific institutional or domain repositories, for example, GFZ Data Services [1), Digital.CSIC [2] and NERC-BGS [3]. These workflows involve the use of controlled vocabularies (geoSciML, NASA GCMD) for better representing MSL datasets and the development and use of data templates with the aim to enable seamless data ingest to international databases after the data are published with a DOI i