The Steering Committee will not attempt to force an investigator to comply with these policy statements, but does wish to encourage and organize full and accurate communication. Plans for data collection must be communicated prior to execution of a field experiment to insure that all necessary data are collected. Data collected during field programs or in laboratory experiments, organized for retrospective studies, or produced from a model must be shared with the scientific community to maximize the scientific value of the data. This document primarily addresses data collected during ship based field experiments. Extrapolation to other types of studies is expected.
Investigators tend to organize their data into periods which are natural for their purposes.
Data culled from generally unavailable or difficult to access archives are of great value to the community. Model results which would be useful to the interpretation of field data or comparison with later model studies should also be included.