Rescued from the deep: Publishing scientific ocean drilling long tail data

Scientific ocean drilling began in 1968 and ever since has been generating huge amounts of data, including that from shipboard analysis of cores, in situ borehole measurements, long-term subseafloor hydrogeological observatories, and post-expedition research done on core samples and data at laboratories around the world (Smith et al., 2010). Much of the data collected aboard the drilling vessels are captured in a number of program databases (e.g., Janus), and eventually archived in a long-term data repository. However, data resulting from researchers’ analyses on core samples in the post-cruise period are generally confined to journal articles and scholarly literature or, particularly for raw or processed data sets, to the hard drives of those researchers. Thus, knowledge of and access to long tail research data that constitutes a significant portion of the overall output of scientific ocean drilling is at risk of remaining lost to the multidisciplinary Earth sciences community.

In order to address the issue of long tail data from scientific ocean drilling, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Management International (IODP-MI) partnered with the data publisher PANGAEA hosted by the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the University of Bremen Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) to conduct a post-cruise data rescue project. This collaboration began in 2007 and continued until 2013. This report summarizes the goals, methods, results, and lessons learned from the IODP Post-Cruise Data Capture Project.