[Esip-preserve] Data citation guidelines

[Mark A. Parsons]

Dear Dr. Killeen,

As a long time advocate of data citation, I was excited to read your recent dear colleague letter. It's great that NSF is officially promoting data citation. To that end, you may be interested that the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) recently adopted a set of data citation guidelines. These guidelines are primarily aimed toward helping repositories and data centers in  developing appropriate citations for Earth system science data. They were developed over several years with very broad input and discussion from around the world and across members of ESIP including NSF-funded members. A notable testing exercise was at the GeoData 2011 conference last year. While we don't claim to have solved all issues of data citation, we do believe these guidelines address most citation needs most of the time. 

Because data citation is an evolving practice, I am sure you and your colleagues will get many questions in response to your letter. I encourage you to direct people to the ESIP guidelines. They are currently on the ESIP wiki at http://bit.ly/data_citation and will be formally published with a DOI on the ESIP information commons soon. 

Finally, you may also be interested in the guidelines developed by the Digital Curation Centre in Edinburgh at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/cite-datasets. They are more general than the ESIP Guidelines but are not specific to Earth science.

Thanks again for promoting the long overdue practice of data citation. 

Mark A. Parsons
Lead Project Manager
National Snow and Ice Data Center
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80304
+1-303-492-2359

-m.

Sent from my iPad. Pardon my mistyped brevity.