How to deposit data with the PDC?
Environmental data collected by Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) funded scientists must be offered to a recognised data centre to ensure appropriate long-term curation and future usability. For data collected in the polar regions, the UK Polar Data Centre is usually the appropriate data centre.
Data acceptance
For acceptance by the Polar Data Centre (PDC), the data must fall within our remit, as described in the data acceptance procedure. In addition, the NERC Environmental Data Service Acquisition Policy covers the acquisition, curation, and dissemination of environmental data, and the criteria for acceptance.
Data deposit
If the data are covered by our data acceptance procedure, you will need to provide the following information via our service desk:
- A completed data transfer agreement (DTA)
- A completed metadata guidance document
- The data in an open format. For guidance on preparing your data please see the data structure information provided and the data quality checklist. If you are depositing as NetCDF please follow the climate and forecasting conventions. Depending on the size of the dataset, there are various options for data transfer. Small datasets can be sent via email or using cloud services, but further advice is available through our service desk.
Data publication and possible embargoed access
Once we have your signed DTA, completed metadata form, and the data, we can then formally accession it. A data manager will check over everything for compliance with international standards and best practices, liaising with you until we’re happy the data are fit for publication.
At the end of the process, we will mint a DOI for the dataset and contact you with the citation. The processing time depends on the complexity of the data and how well they have been prepared.
We recommend contacting the PDC as early as possible especially if you would like to publish data supporting a publication. Please note that the PDC can publish data under embargo with password-protected reviewer access, so the data is released alongside an associated paper for greater impact.
Contact
Email: PDCServiceDesk@bas.ac.uk