Despite the widespread interest in best track data that describes the distribution and frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones worldwide, no central repository of such data exists. There are currently six Regional Specialized Meteorological Center's (RSMC) and five Tropical Cyclone Warning Centers (TCWC) around the world that forecast and monitor storms in each of the tropical-cyclone-prone basins and annually archive best track data: information on a storm's position, intensity, as well as other related parameters. The International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) is a project under the auspices of the World Data Center for Meteorology – Asheville to collect and disseminate the historical tropical cyclone best track data from all available centers, merging the disparate data sets into one comprehensive product for the user community. One of the goals of the project is for the data processing methods to remain open, such that desired user feedback on data quality is more easily collected. Also, data provenance is completely recorded so all observations and corrections, either through rigorous quality control or user feedback, may be tracked. Data are then provided in various formats given the diversity of the tropical cyclone data user community. The presentation will summarize the purpose and vision of the project, the methods used to merge the data, and a discussion of results of computed global and basin-wide tropical cyclone statistics, including a comparison of previous studies which used only a subset of the data constituting IBTrACS.