Universität Bremen (UniHB), Germany (PANGAEA)

PANGAEA is an information system and data publisher for geoscientific and environmental data. It is the designated archive for the journal Earth System Science Data (ESSD) and recommended data repository of several international scientific journals such as Scientific Data by Nature Research (formerly Nature Publishing Group). PANGAEA is also the recommended depository for data supplements to Elsevier publications in three subject areas (Agriculture and Biological Sciences, Earth & Planetary Sciences, Environmental Sciences). Overall, the „Guidelines for Authors“ of about 500 Journals recommend depositing supplementary data at PANGAEA. Furthermore, PANGAEA co-chairs the ICSU-WDS and RDA Working Groups on data publication and holds mandates from the World Meteorological Organization (World Radiation Monitoring Center).

PANGAEA is jointly operated by the Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) at the University of Bremen (UniHB) and the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research at Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI). MARUM is a Research Faculty offering a number of technical and scientific services in the field of ocean research and furthermore developing innovative technology in support for scientific operations.

Key services supplied by PANGAEA include data curation, long-term data archiving and data publication. Data curation includes quality control of metadata and the development of ontologies and vocabularies according to international protocols and standards. Metadata are extensive and each dataset can be cited using a DOI. The information system is operated in the sense of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities which is a follow up to the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Some ongoing projects are under moratorium so that access to data may be restricted, but metadata is always freely accessible.