Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a flexible and powerful tool for quantifying the total environmental impact of a product or service from cradle-to-grave. The US federal government has developed deep expertise in environmental LCA for a range of applications including policy, regulation, and emerging technologies. LCA professionals from across the government have been coordinating the distributed LCA expertise through a community of practice known as the Federal LCA Commons. The Federal LCA Commons has developed open data infrastructure and workflows to share knowledge and align LCA methods. This data infrastructure is a key component to creating a harmonized network of LCA capacity from across the federal government.

This article examines a cross-section of literature and other resources to reveal common reproducibility issues faced by stakeholders regardless of subject area or focus. We identify a variety of issues named as reproducibility barriers, the solutions to such barriers, and reflect on how researchers and information professionals can act to address the ‘reproducibility crisis.’ The finished products of this work include an annotated list of 122 published resources and a primer that identifies and defines key concepts from the resources that contribute to the crisis.

No abstract

The United States Agricultural Research Service (ARS) recently declared a grand challenge: Transform agriculture to deliver a 20% increase in quality*1 food availability with 20% lower environmental impact by 2025. Addressing this challenge requires a sea change in how it conducts agricultural research. Not only will teams need to be multidisciplinary, as they begin to pursue big data and data-intensive approaches, they will need to find effective ways to share their diverse kinds of data with each other, with other research teams, with members of farming and business communities, and with policymakers. Biodiversity is a key component of food production (crop and livestock species, for example, and the pollinators and microbes they depend on) and the impact that food production (including reduction of pest and pathogen species) has on the environment (species richness, invasive species, and ecosystem services, for example). It is currently unclear how much biodiversity data relevant to agriculture is being made available, and if so where it is. These questions are part of a general need to understand how our pilot platform for USDA-funded data cataloging and publication, the Ag Data Commons https:// data.nal.usda.gov, can best support grand challenge research. It will also help agricultural librarians assist their researchers in data management and publication. Therefore we conducted an extensive inventory of the options available to researchers both for finding data and sharing data related to the broader areas of agricultural research. We present the general results for agriculture overall, then explore the agrobiodiversity sector specifically. We found 230 active and publicly available agriculture-specific databases and repositories, ‡ § § © Parr C et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.