Sir

Your Opinion article “Make the most of palaeodata” (Nature 411, 1; 2001) called for public funding of palaeoclimatic research, more interdisciplinary collaboration and the systematic archiving of data.

The International Geosphere–Biosphere programme's core project on past global changes (PAGES) (http://www.pages-igbp.org) and the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo) exist specifically to address these needs, including facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration, providing publicly available palaeoenvironmental data archives, and coordinating the efforts of the “maze of publicly supported databases”.

For more than a decade, the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology (WDC-Paleo), hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Paleoclimatology Program in Boulder, Colorado, has been working to ensure that palaeoclimate data are freely available. Serving as the PAGES international palaeodata system, WDC-Paleo houses myriad proxy data from thousands of sites. PAGES and WDC-Paleo collaborate with the research community and international partners to provide a long-term, open archive of these important data.

Many agencies and journals are already helping to promote data sharing. In the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the NOAA and the US Global Change Research Program have strong data-sharing policies. The NSF/NOAA initiative on Earth system history requires as a condition of funding that data are submitted to WDC-Paleo. The journals Paleoceanography and Journal of Paleolimnology both encourage authors to submit their data to WDC-Paleo, and Science now requires archival data to be deposited in a publicly accessible database. We encourage more journals to require or request submission of data to internationally approved public archives.

PAGES, WDC-Paleo and the many scientists and institutions that support them have made great efforts to make data easily accessible and usable.

Agencies funding palaeoclimate research must be committed to providing resources for investigators to prepare their data for inclusion, and for data centres to maintain free, open, international archives of palaeoclimate data and the tools to access them.