About BCO-DMO:

1. What is BCO-DMO?
2. Who funds BCO-DMO?
3. Who are the people in BCO-DMO?
4. How do I contact BCO-DMO?
5. How do you pronounce BCO-DMO?

Data Management Plans:

1. What are NSF’s requirements for data management?
2. What is NSF's data management plan?

Data Contribution and Access:

1. How do I get started?
2. When should I contact BCO-DMO?
3. What types of data can BCO-DMO manage?
4. What data formats can BCO-DMO accept?
5. Does BCO-DMO have any guidelines for submitting data as a spreadsheet?
6. My data are online already. Do I need to send my data to BCO-DMO too?
7. Must data contributors send their data to BCO-DMO to have them accessible?
8. How can I submit large data files to BCO-DMO?
9. How much metadata is necessary?
10. Can my project get free help from BCO-DMO to manage my data?
11. What can I do to make the management of my data easier?
12. If I need data management help, who should I call at BCO-DMO?
13. What formats are available for downloading data from BCO-DMO?
14. How can the data that BCO-DMO manages be accessed?
15. How can I cite datasets accessible via BCO-DMO in the literature?
16. Where does BCO-DMO archive the data?

Other:

1. Are there parallel DMO's for physical and geological oceanography?
2. How do I request the R2R event log capability on my upcoming cruise on a UNOLS vessel?
3. What is the JGOFS/GLOBEC data management system?

Answers:

What is BCO-DMO?

BCO-DMO is the Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office. We help oceanography researchers who are funded by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF's) Division of Ocean Sciences' (OCE) Biological or Chemical Oceanography Sections or the Division of Polar Programs' Antarctic Organisms & Ecosystems Program manage their data, making them accessible over the internet.

Who funds BCO-DMO?

BCO-DMO is primarily funded by an NSF grant (OCE-1031253).

Who are the people in BCO-DMO?

BCO-DMO is made up of people with a very strong interest in making your data useful to you and to others. We have decades of experience (some of us are older than we look) managing data from many domains including biological, geochemical, geological, and physical oceanography.

How do I contact BCO-DMO?

The best way to contact BCO-DMO is to send an email to info@bco-dmo.org. You can expect to receive a reply within 48-hours.  If you encounter any issues sending email please refer to our Contact Us page and reach out to one of our Data Managers.

If you are already working with a Data Manager on a particular dataset feel free to email them directly.  However, all new submissions and dataset updates should be sent to info@bco-dmo.org so they can be registered in our system.  

How do you pronounce BCO-DMO?

Bee Co Dee Mo

What are the NSF requirements for data management?

NSF has a general, but well-defined data management policy section contained within the Grant Proposal Guide (GPG). However, specific data management requirements of a given Directorate, Division, Program or other NSF Unit may supercede this general policy.  The Division of Ocean Sciences (OCE) updated its Sample and Data Policy in 2016. Of note is the requirement that data collected by researchers funded by NSF must be made publically available within two years of the data collection/production. 

What is NSF's data management plan?

Every proposal to NSF must include a Data Management Plan (DMP), no longer than two pages, which includes information about how the results of the proposed research will be made available and accessible to the public in a timely manner. BCO-DMO has guidelines for investigators preparing NSF Data Management Plans (DMPs), including a DMP Template.

How do I get started?

Once you have your NSF award number is a good time to get started by contacting us. Our How to Get Started page provides details, but the first step is just to let us know via email that you want BCO-DMO to work with you. There are resources at BCO-DMO that can help you even as you prepare your proposal: please see information about NSF's data management plan and help in planning your data collection effort.

» Quick Start Guide (pdf)

When should I contact BCO-DMO?

You can wait until you receive your NSF award and know your award number before you contact us. We can collect much of the preliminary metadata about your project directly from NSF.

What types of data can BCO-DMO manage?

BCO-DMO can deal with a wide variety of data, including but not limited to biological, chemical and physical oceanography measurements, and experimental and model results. We routinely deal with CTD, biological abundance, meteorological, nutrient, pH, carbonate, PAR, sea surface temperature, heat and momentum flux, sediment composition, trace metals, primary production, and pigment concentration measurements, and with images and movies.

BCO-DMO does not host raw sequence or mass spectrometry data, but can link to authoritative repositories that do. In doing so BCO-DMO can serve as a valuable means to discover and place these data in their appropriate environmental context (for further detail on the benefits of this activity, see "Advantages of Submitting Omics Data Links to BCO-DMO"). While the raw sequence data should be sent to an appropriate disciplinary repository such as the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), sequence accession numbers and the associated environmental data can be contributed to BCO-DMO. Links to the sequence repository will be created and hosted along with other project output. This ensures that the data are discoverable from BCO-DMO's website. See "Contributing Sequence Accession Numbers" for more information.

What data formats can BCO-DMO accept?

Usually, measurements come to BCO-DMO as ASCII or spreadsheet files. However, we try to be flexible and are willing to work with whatever reasonably organized format the investigator uses. We have some suggestions for what formats are easier to work with, but these are only suggestions, not requirements.

Does BCO-DMO have any guidelines for submitting data as a spreadsheet?

Yes, we do. Please review our Submitting Data in a Spreadsheet document for some guidelines.

My data are online already. Do I need to send my data to BCO-DMO too?

BCO-DMO does not want to duplicate the effort of other data assembly centers (DAC), so if the data are accessible from a recognized DAC (like the LTER network office) and the DAC or the scientist takes responsibility to ensure the data are properly archived at a recognized national archive, we believe the NSF guidelines/requirements are met. However, providing access via a project- or program-specific website is not likely to be sufficient because these types of websites usually do not have the funding to provide the longer term data and metadata access implied by the requirements.

It is important that the data be managed in such a way that they are discoverable and reusable by others. This means that there is sufficient metadata to support proper data reuse and that the actual data, not just resulting graphs, are accessible. Although your data may already be online, there may still be value in having BCO-DMO involved if the dataset is of interest to scientists using BCO-DMO and there is benefit in having these data accessible directly from BCO-DMO.

Must data contributors send their data to BCO-DMO to have them accessible?

No. BCO-DMO uses a distributed data management system called JGOFS/GLOBEC that supports distributed data servers. As long as your data can be placed on a Linux or Unix based machine that has a web site, your data can remain on your machine. The approach has the advantage of always serving the most up to date and accurate version of the data.

How can I submit large data files to BCO-DMO?

For large volumes of data we suggest using Dropbox. Please see https://www.dropbox.com/.  If you don't have your own Dropbox account, a BCO-DMO Data Manager will set up a folder for you and send you a URL that will allow you to upload your data into our Dropbox using your browser. Another option is to make the files available online (ftp, Google Drive, etc.) and let us know how to get them.  If you still have questions, please contact us for alternative approaches.

How much metadata is necessary?

The information contained in the metadata should be sufficient to allow another researcher to make use of your data, and, in a sense, to be able to recreate it. For example, it should include the sources of your data (names of the instruments or software model(s) used), how you processed these data, and how they were analyzed. If you have this information contained in a paper, you can duplicate it for the metadata. By all means, include the reference to this paper too in your metadata. Names of the field names (columns) and their units should be described completely.

Can my project get free help from BCO-DMO to manage my data?

BCO-DMO is funded to work with researchers funded by the NSF Geosciences Directorate's Division of Ocean Sciences' Biological and Chemical Oceanography Sections and the Division of Polar Programs' Antarctic Organisms & Ecosystems Program. We have some latitude in working with researchers outside of these sections and would be happy to learn more about your project to see if BCO-DMO should be involved.

What can I do to make the management of my data easier?

We are glad you asked! Please read our Data Management Best Practices Guide.

If I need data management help, who should I call at BCO-DMO?

You can send an email to info@bco-dmo.org or contact a particular person.

What formats are available for downloading data from BCO-DMO?

Data can be downloaded from BCO-DMO as tab-, comma-, and space-separated ASCII files, Matlab binary files, netCDF format (if the data are amenable to this format), and ODV format (if the data are amenable to this format). Data can also be accessed using Open Geospatial Consortium’s (OGC) Web Mapping Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) through our MapServer interface. For more information on finding and downloading data using the BCO-DMO data system, please refer to our Data Access Tutorial (PDF).

How can the data that BCO-DMO manages be accessed?

Any standard web browser including Firefox, Chrome, Safari, as well as Internet Explorer can access data managed by BCO-DMO. We provide both text based and geospatial access. For more information on finding and downloading data using the BCO-DMO data system, please refer to our Data Access Tutorial (PDF). We also have a short video on finding and downloading data using BCO-DMO's ERDDAP implementation, in the BCO-DMO Data Access Demo.

How can I cite datasets accessible via BCO-DMO in the literature?

Please refer to our citation recommendations and usage guidelines.

Where does BCO-DMO archive the data?

BCO-DMO endeavors to archive the data it manages with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). However, it also submits an immutable copy of all published data receiving a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) with the Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Library (a CoreTrustSeal certified institutional repository located at WHOI).

Are there parallel DMO's for physical and geological oceanography?

• For NSF-sponsored Physical Oceanography projects, investigators are encouraged to contact the CLIVAR and Carbon Hydrographic Data Office (CCHDO) or archive their data directly with the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).
• For marine geology, contact the Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA) group hosted at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University.
• For projects supported by NSF Arctic Sciences Program (ARC) investigators, the newly formed Arctic Data Center which succeeds the Advanced Cooperative Arctic Data and Information Service (ACADIS), should be contacted. The Arctic Data Center is supported by NSF and is led by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California Santa Barbara, to develop and curate the NSF Arctic Data Center, an archive for Arctic scientific data as well as other related research documents.
• Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) funded projects can submit data to their regional GoMRI location. See https://data.gulfresearchinitiative.org/about for additional information including their data management plan under the "Design and Management" menu option.

How do I request the R2R eventlog capability on my upcoming cruise on a UNOLS vessel?

To request the R2R eventlog capability on your cruise, use the ELOG request form at http://www.rvdata.us/contact/elog.

What is the JGOFS/GLOBEC data management system?

The JGOFS/GLOBEC data management system provides the primary means of accessing the online data managed by BCO-DMO.