About iPlaces

iPlaces is a platform that integrates tools focused on the critical early ‘field’ phases of research projects that sample and digitize social-ecological systems. It aims to serve and empower places, giving local stewards (and ordinary citizens) greater agency over the information generated in and about the people, culture and nature that constitute their place. Our approach is to innovate and disrupt the entire publishing model while still utilizing its key platforms, tools, and incentive structures.

We do this by leveraging the research artifact of a ‘paper’ to establish a field project’s connection to a place through a new kind of place-based journal and associated ‘data trust’, controlled locally but connected globally. By doing this, we offer an elegant way for the data and protocols of field science to be immediately linked through formal citations that leverage existing Open Science research infrastructure. In addition, this provides a Traditional Knowledge / Biocultural “notice” to the local community through the Local Contexts platform. The result is a science-culture dialogue that helps to integrate research findings and local/traditional knowledge. The formal institutions of science and associated norms (e.g., peer review) and tools (e.g., journals) facilitate the publication of scientific “marker” papers in iPlaces journals that describe a place-based project and link the resulting field data. While the approach is simple, the implementation requires integration and the development of new technology and processes. Rapid progress is possible, however, as iPlaces can leverage powerful existing systems (knowledge graphs, citation indexes, research information systems, etc.) to offer an easy-to-implement best practice that enables both local and scientific communities to find, access, and re-use research, as openly as appropriate, and in near real-time.