Many venues exist for finding and accessing atmospheric data. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) alone provides access to many thousands of data sets, including decade-to-century long time-series' of meteorological and atmospheric observations, climate model output data sets, and experimental data sets from field deployments. While these NCAR data sets are openly available and widely used, tracking the data chain - from collection, to use, to publication and archiving, to re-use – can be very difficult. Data use metrics are difficult to ascertain due to inconsistent or non-existent citations to data in the published literature. Another challenge is the limited use of unique identifier schemes to enable direct linking to data sets online.

At NCAR, we are currently working to address both of these challenges by developing a formal organization-wide data citation policy and implementation. Our data citation initiative has three main motivations, in no particular order: 1) formal citations can allow scientists to be given credit for their work in collecting and creating data, 2) formal citations can allow NCAR data managers to track the use of data sets over time, providing a more nuanced view of the value of their data management activities, 3) formal citations can enable data to be discovered, accessed, and used more easily by bringing data and their resultant publications closer together. Through this work we hope to make the science that utilizes NCAR data more open and transparent.

This presentation will emphasize our work in developing a coherent data citation framework that encompasses the broad range of NCAR data. We will discuss Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) technology, and how we are planning to apply DOIs across NCAR as citable locators for data sets. We will also discuss our efforts in making data citations more visible within research institutions.