PANGAEA an ICSU World

Since 1992 PANGAEA R © serves as an archive for all types of geoscientific and environmental data. From the beginning the PANGAEA group started initiatives and aimed at an organisation structure which – beyond the technical structure and operation of the system – would help to improve the quality and general availability of scientific data. Project data management is done since 1996. 2001 the ICSU World Data Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (WDC-MARE) was founded and since 2003 – together with other German WDC – the group was working on the development of data publications as a new publication type. To achieve interoperability with other data centers and portals the system was adapted to global information standards. PANGAEA R © has implemented a number of community specific data portals. 2007 – under the coordination of the PANGAEA R © group – an initiative for networking all WDC was started. On the long range ISCU supports plans to develop the WDC system into a global network of publishers and open access libraries for scientific data.