When should I contact BCO-DMO?
You can wait until you receive your NSF award and know your award number before you contact us. We can collect much of the preliminary metadata about your project directly from NSF.
What types of data can BCO-DMO manage?
BCO-DMO can deal with a wide variety of data, including but not limited to biological, chemical and physical oceanography measurements and experimental and model results. We routinely deal with CTD, biological abundance, meteorological, nutrient, pH, carbonate, PAR, sea surface temperature, heat and momentum flux, sediment composition, trace metals, primary production, and pigment concentration measurements, and with images and movies. While sequence data should be sent to GenBank, sequence accession numbers and the associated environmental data can be contributed to BCO-DMO and we can provide the links to the sequence repository. This ensures that the data are discoverable from BCO-DMO's website. Please see "Contributing Sequence Accession Numbers" for more information.
What data formats can BCO-DMO accept?
Usually, measurements come to BCO-DMO as ASCII or spreadsheet files. However, we try to be flexible and are willing to work with whatever reasonably organized format the investigator uses. We have some suggestions for what formats are easier to work with, but these are only suggestions, not requirements.
Does BCO-DMO have any guidelines for submitting data as a spreadsheet?
Yes, we do. Please review Submitting Data in a Spreadsheet for guidelines.
My data are online already. Do I need to send my data to BCO-DMO too?
BCO-DMO does not want to duplicate the effort of other data assembly centers (DAC), so if the data are accessible from a recognized DAC (like the LTER network office) and the DAC or the scientist takes responsibility to ensure the data are properly archived at a recognized national archive, we believe the NSF guidelines/requirements are met. However, providing access via a project- or program-specific website is not likely to be sufficient because these types of websites usually do not have the funding to provide the longer term data and metadata access implied by the requirements.
It is important that the data be managed in such a way that they are discoverable and reusable by others. This means that there is sufficient metadata to support proper data reuse and that the actual data, not just resulting graphs, are accessible. Although your data may already be online, there may still be value in having BCO-DMO involved if the dataset is of interest to scientists using BCO-DMO and there is benefit in having these data accessible directly from BCO-DMO.
Must data contributors send their data to BCO-DMO to have them accessible?
No. BCO-DMO uses a distributed data management system called JGOFS/GLOBEC that supports distributed data servers. As long as your data can be placed on a Linux or Unix based machine that has a web site, your data can remain on your machine. The approach has the advantage of always serving the most up to date and accurate version of the data.
How can I submit large data files to BCO-DMO?
For large volumes of data we suggest using Dropbox. Please see https://www.dropbox.com/. If you don't have your own Dropbox account, a BCO-DMO Data Manager will set up a folder for you and send you a URL that will allow you to upload your data into our Dropbox using your browser. Another option is to make the files available online (ftp, Google Drive, etc.) and let us know how to get them. If you still have questions, please contact us for alternative approaches.
How much metadata is necessary?
The information contained in the metadata should be sufficient to allow another researcher to make use of your data, and, in a sense, to be able to recreate it. For example, it should include the sources of your data (names of the instruments or software model(s) used), how you processed these data, and how they were analyzed. If you have this information contained in a paper, you can duplicate it for the metadata. By all means, include the reference to this paper too in your metadata. Names of the field names (columns) and their units should be described completely.
Can my project get free help from BCO-DMO to manage my data?
BCO-DMO is funded to work with researchers funded by the NSF Geosciences Directorate's Division of Ocean Sciences' Biological and Chemical Oceanography Sections and the Division of Polar Programs' Antarctic Organisms & Ecosystems Program. We have some latitude in working with researchers outside of these sections and would be happy to learn more about your project to see if BCO-DMO should be involved.
