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Policy and Guidance for Data and Code Sharing Policy

Guiding Principles​

We provide the following principles that guide CIROH’s activities and associated data sharing:

  • Science is reproducible.
  • Reproducibility of scientific work is enabled through openness.
  • Open science is enabled through open access to data, source code, accessible computational resources, and sufficient metadata for interpretation/use.
  • Products of CIROH research are produced at public expense and should be broadly accessible to the public.

Policy Statement​

CIROH follows NOAA’s Data Sharing Directive, which is included in the Terms and Conditions of CIROH’s Cooperative Agreement with NOAA and is also available here (Version 3.0 at the time of this writing). CIROH is responsible for implementing these conditions and ensuring that they are also met by CIROH sub-recipients and subcontractors. The Data Management Plan submitted with the original CIROH proposal is included as an Appendix to this document.

The specific wording included in the CIROH Cooperative Agreement is as follows:

  • Data Sharing: Environmental data collected or created under this Grant, Cooperative Agreement, or Contract must be made publicly visible and accessible in a timely manner, free of charge or at minimal cost that is no more than the cost of distribution to the user, except where limited by law, regulation, policy, or national security requirements. Data are to be made available in a form that would permit further analysis or reuse: data must be encoded in a machine-readable format, preferably using existing open format standards; data must be sufficiently documented, preferably using open metadata standards, to enable users to independently read and understand the data. The location (internet address) of the data should be included in the final report. Pursuant to NOAA Information Quality Guidelines, data should undergo quality control (QC), and a description of the QC process and results should be referenced in the metadata.
  • Timeliness: Data accessibility must occur no later than publication of a peer-reviewed article based on the data, or two years after the data are collected and verified, or two years after the original end date of the grant (not including any extensions or follow-on funding), whichever is soonest unless a delay has been authorized by the NOAA funding program.
  • Disclaimer: Data produced under this award and made available to the public must be accompanied by the following statement: "These data and related items of information have not been formally disseminated by NOAA, and do not represent any agency determination, view, or policy."
  • Failure to Share Data: Failing or delaying to make environmental data accessible in accordance with the submitted Data Management Plan, unless authorized by the NOAA Program, may lead to enforcement actions and will be considered by NOAA when making future award decisions. Funding recipients are responsible for ensuring these conditions are also met by sub-recipients and subcontractors.
  • Funding acknowledgment: Federal funding sources shall be identified in all scholarly publications. An Acknowledgements section shall be included in the body of the publication stating the relevant Grant Programs and Award Numbers. In addition, funding sources shall be reported during the publication submission process using the FundRef mechanism (http://www.crossref.org/fundref/) if supported by the Publisher.
  • Manuscript submission: The final pre-publication manuscripts of scholarly publications produced with NOAA funding shall be submitted to the NOAA Institutional Repository at http://library.noaa.gov/repository after acceptance and no later than upon publication of the paper by a journal. NOAA will produce a publicly-visible catalog entry directing users to the published version of the article. After an embargo period of one year after publication, NOAA shall make the manuscript itself publicly visible, free of charge, while continuing to direct users to the published version of record.
  • Data Citation: Publications based on data, and new products derived from source data, must cite the data used according to the conventions of the Publisher, using unambiguous labels such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). All data and derived products that are used to support the conclusions of a peer-reviewed publication must be made available in a form that permits verification and reproducibility of the results.

Important Definitions​

There are several definitions in NOAA’s Data and Publication Sharing Directive that we provide here for interpretation of the above text. For the full list and for the exact statement of these definitions, refer to the full text of NOAA’s Data Sharing Directive (Version 3.0) at the link in the section above.

  1. Research Results: Defined as environmental data and peer-reviewed publications under NOAA’s Data Sharing Directive.
  2. Environmental Data: Defined by NOAA Administrative Order (NAO) 212-15 as:
    • Recorded and derived observations and measurements of:
      • Physical, chemical, biological, geological, and geophysical properties and conditions of:
        • Oceans, atmosphere, space environment, sun, and solid earth.
        • Correlative data such as socio-economic data, related documentation, and metadata.
    • Includes digital audio or video recordings of environmental phenomena and numerical model outputs used to support peer-reviewed publications.
    • Data collected in a laboratory or other controlled environment, including measurements of animals and chemical processes.
  3. Data Sharing Directive: Defines "data" specifically as environmental data.
  4. Sharing Data: Making data publicly visible and accessible in a timely manner at no cost or minimal cost, in a machine-readable format based on open standards, along with necessary metadata.
  5. Timeliness: Data accessibility must occur no later than publication of a peer-reviewed article based on the data or within two years of data collection or grant end date, whichever is soonest, unless authorized delay by NOAA.
  6. Applicability: Applies to new data created by extramural funding recipients; internally produced NOAA data or collaborative research data are subject to the NOAA Data Access Directive.
  7. Exclusions: Laboratory notebooks, preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific papers, plans for future research, peer review reports, communications with colleagues, or physical objects are not covered under NOAA’s Data Sharing Directive.