Resisting Contextual Collapse: How an Internet of Places (iPlaces) can Help Marine Labs Operationalize FAIR and CARE for Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice

Research Stations help scientists gather data at source and witness the resilience and fragility of our planet firsthand. Despite their role in understanding the complex physical, biogeochemical, ecological, social, and economic interactions that constitute place, station contributions often remain unrecognized. Metadata describing the samples/data they help originate is too easily stripped or lost as value is added downstream. To fight this "contextual collapse," we present a new publishing platform (iPlaces) that empowers investigators to publish descriptions of their field projects (marker papers) in a station journal, providing each project with a landing page and a digital object identifier. Through the familiar manuscript review process (with the station director acting as editor), iPlaces introduces a way to layer ethical, legal, social, and scientific metadata to field research. Part of a collaborative ecosystem, iPlaces links and leverages a suite of online services (e.g., GEOME, ORCID, DataCite, iSamples, Local Contexts), promoting their uptake in place-based research. For example, working with Local Contexts, iPlaces enables a station to issue 'notices' for a proposed project, thus initiating dialogue with local communities and combatting "parachute science". Communities can then issue 'labels', a form of social metadata (e.g., Prior Informed Consent), to projects and their field samples/data, helping to operationalize CARE as well as FAIR data principles. As data and samples move downstream, value-added products are linked automatically through the global open science infrastructure, ensuring the connection back to place (the station and its associated communities). iPlaces thus positions stations as crucial partners connecting nature and communities to the global research enterprise, supporting scientific discovery and environmental stewardship in the service of people, places, and planet.