Data policy

NODC recognise that the timely and unrestricted international exchange of oceanographic data is essential for the efficient acquisition, integration and use of ocean observations, gathered by the countries of the world for a wide variety of purposes.

All information, data, objects, products, programmes and routines are freely available and free of charge under the owner (producer) policy conditions and their wide use for no profit science and education is encouraged. By their use you accept that, whenever substantial use is made of any individual data source, an offer of co-authorship should be considered through personal contact with the data providers or owners. In all cases, an acknowledgement must be madeto the data providers or owners and to the data centre when these data are used within a publication. Data cannot be re-distributed to third parties

To promote data exchange, NODC follows the new Oceanographic Data Exchange Policy and Terms of Use (2023) of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO. The data policy was adopted by the IOC Assembly during its 32nd Session (June 2023). The purpose is to outline the requirements with respect to sharing, access, preservation, and attribution to facilitate the broad use and reuse of metadata, data and products.

Read more about the IOC Data Policy on the website of the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange Programme of the UNESCO IOC.

NODC also follows the policy on data access, which was released by the Data Commission of the OGS section of Oceanography (OCE) in 2019. Read more about the OCE Data Policy.

Finally, the NODC Data Policy also fulfils the requirements of the Data policy of SeaDataNet, the Pan-European Infrastructure for Ocean & Marine Data Management.