All investigators participating in PECAN agree to promptly submit their preliminary quality controlled data to the PECAN Data Archive Center (PDAC) at the latest by 15 January 2016 (six months after the end of the field campaign) to facilitate inter-comparison of results, quality control checks and inter-calibrations, as well as an integrated interpretation of the combined data set.

During the data analysis period, defined as a one-year period following the end of the field campaign, PECAN PIs will have exclusive access to this data. This analysis period is designed to provide an opportunity to quality control the combined data set as well as to provide the investigators ample time to publish their results. Data will be password protected upon the request of the data provider.

All data will be considered public domain at least one year after the agreed submission deadline to the PECAN archive (i.e., on 16 July 2016 and thereafter). A data set within the PECAN archive can be opened to the public domain earlier at the discretion of the data provider for this particular data set.

All data shall be promptly provided to other PECAN investigators upon request. All PECAN investigators will have equal access to all data. A list of PECAN investigators will be maintained by NCAR/EOL and will include the Principal Investigators (PIs) directly participating in the field experiment as well as collaborating scientists who have provided guidance in the planning and analysis of PECAN data.

During the data analysis period, the investigator(s) who collected the data must be notified first of the intent to use the data, in particular if data is to be provided to a third party (e.g., journal articles, presentations, research proposals, other investigators). It is strongly encouraged that PIs responsible for acquisition of data be invited to become collaborators and co-authors on any projects, publications and presentations. If the contribution of the data product is significant to the publication, the PIs responsible for generating a measurement or a data product should be offered the right of co-authorship. Any use of the data should include an acknowledgment (i.e., citation). In all circumstances, the PIs responsible for acquisition of data should be acknowledged appropriately. Following availability in the public domain, users of the data are strongly encouraged to contact the relevant PIs prior to incorporating it into peer-reviewed publications.

International agencies, professional societies, and research organizations are moving towards requiring researchers to formally cite data and sources that led to a given research result. Consequently, there has been an increased use of DOIs or Digital Object Identifiers (used to cite publications for many years), as a simple standard way to also reference or cite datasets.  DOIs allow for linkages between datasets and respective publications, thus providing the ability to track the use of these datasets in the literature (metrics). DOIs are considered “perpetual” and citation format standards have been established for data DOIs. Once final datasets are submitted to the PDAC, EOL will create and distribute respective DOIs that should be used in PECAN related publications.