The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

At a Glance

NOAA NOAA Administrative Order (NAO) 212-15, Management of Environmental Data and Information, states that environmental data is to be managed based upon a lifecycle that includes developing and following a data management plan.

Note: In accordance with the NOAA Plan for Increasing Public Access to Research Results (NOAA PARR), released in February 2015, NOAA's Data Sharing Policy for Grants and Cooperative Agreements was revised, with new provisions effective as of the second quarter of Fiscal Year 2016.

NOAA grantees must provide a Data Sharing Plan. Requests for proposals to be submitted after June 2016 will include detailed instructions from the granting program concerning what the Data Sharing Plan should consist of. Some excerpts from the Procedural Directive:

Environmental data and information collected or created under NOAA grants or cooperative agreements must be made discoverable by and accessible to the general public, in a timely fashion (typically within two years), free of charge or at no more than the cost of reproduction, unless an exemption is granted by the NOAA Program. Data should be available in at least one machine-readable format, preferably a widely-used or open-standard format, and should also be accompanied by machine-readable documentation (metadata), preferably based on widely-used or international standards.

NOAA may, at its own discretion, make publicly visible the Data Management Plan from funded proposals, or use information from the Data Management Plan to produce a formal metadata record and include that metadata in a Catalog to indicate the pending availability of new data.

Proposal submitters are hereby advised that the final pre-publication manuscripts of scholarly articles produced entirely or primarily with NOAA funding will be required to be submitted to NOAA Institutional Repository after acceptance, and no later than upon publication. Such manuscripts shall be made publicly available by NOAA one year after publication by the journal.

The NOAA Enviromental Data Management Wiki provides additional information, but consult with your program manager about specific requirements for your project.

Unidata has a sample Data Management Plan for an NOAA proposal here.