Michael Diepenbroek1, Hannes Grobe2, Robert Huber1 & Uwe Schindler1
1 MARUM - Institute for Marine Environmental Sciences, University Bremen, Leobener Strasse, 28359 Bremen, Germany
2 AWI - Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Columbusstrasse, 27570 Bremerhaven, Germany
The World Data Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (WDC-MARE) is aimed at collecting, scrutinizing, and disseminating data related to global change in the fields of environmental oceanography, marine geology, paleoceanography, and marine biology. WDC-MARE uses the scientific information system PANGAEA (Network for Geosciences and Environmental Data) as operating platform (www.pangaea.de).
Essential services supplied by WDC-MARE / PANGAEA are project data management (e.g. JGOFS, IODP, IMAGES), data publication, and the distribution of visualization and analysis software. Organization of data management includes a peer review like quality control and publication of data and the dissemination of metadata according to international standards. All published data sets are registered at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB). The registry was recently established in a project funded by the German Research Foundation. It is based on Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) also widely used for traditional publications. The TIB is the first global registration agency for primary scientific data. Persistent identifiers are an important prerequisite for referencing and citation of scientific contents in the internet. Within PANGAEA registration is automated using the corresponding web service at the TIB.