From open science goals to technical implementation: Enabling sustainable data sharing for a research team

In this talk, we will present how as RSEs we helped a research team achieve part of their open science goals. A group of researchers studying the generation of scientific knowledge for socio-ecological sustainability sought to share with the public a 5.5-million-row dataset they created during a three-year project in an accessible and engaging way. While their initial expectation was to create a dashboard using Shiny for R, it soon became clear that the nature of the dataset, the financial constraints of the project, and the target audience required a broader approach. During the talk, we will discuss how we approached the process of understanding their needs, managing expectations, and devising a sustainable solution. We will also share some of the technical decisions made to that end, such as restructuring the data for efficient querying, precomputing summary tables, implementing interface logic that dynamically adjusted the level of granularity based on user interaction, and developing a companion R package. These design decisions balanced usability with long-term maintainability, ensuring that the tool could remain available beyond the end of the research funding. This experience illustrates how RSEs contribute not only code, but also strategic thinking that bridges open research goals with the technical realities of implementation. By aligning design decisions with open science principles and practical constraints, RSEs can help ensure that research outputs are not just published, but also usable, reusable, and impactful over time. Acknowledgements The research project "Social Networks and Socio-ecological Sustainability Project" (FONDECYT No. 1220560) was funded by the Chilean National Research and Development Agency (ANID). Its principal investigator is Julien Vanhulst, from Universidad Católica del Maule, in Chile.A recording of this session is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/e1m8OR54bfs