Data Sharing Guidelines

The basic tenets of ARM data sharing are:

• “Free and open” sharing of data.
• Timely delivery of processed data from the ARM Data Center to the infrastructure staff and collaborating science team members. Timely is defined as “near real time” as in within hours typically of collection.
• Timely access to data by the general scientific community through the ARM Data Center. Timely is defined typically as “days” for routine processing, housekeeping and archival of data from electronically accessible instrument sites.
• Timely sharing of all data among various participants in ARM-sponsored programs.
• Recognition of data sources either through co-authorship or acknowledgments as appropriate.
• Sharing of data of common interest from external sources when possible; some sources restrict secondary distribution of data. In these cases, ARM will seek specific allowances to distribute such data to members of the Atmospheric System Research (ASR) Science Team, but will observe restrictions on further distribution from the ARM Data Center if required.

• All routine observational data will be made available to collaborating science team members with a minimum delay following data collection and automated data quality assessment.
• At remote locations, data may be locally stored and retrieved periodically on storage media. Data will be made available as soon as possible after retrieval and following initial quality control by site scientists and processing by the Data Management Facility.
• In some cases, summary data files may be sent to the Data Management Facility for the purpose of data quality assessment and appear on the Data Quality Office website. These data should not be used for any purposes other than qualitative.
  All quality-controlled data are freely publishable upon receipt.
• Intensive Operational Period and Campaign Data Specifics