Netherlands Polar Data Center

The mission of the Netherlands Polar Data Center (NPDC) is to assist scientists with the archiving of and giving access to data from Polar research.

Polar data are extremely valuable, as often considerable cost and efforts are involved in obtaining them. Moreover, they are mostly unique data. The Antarctic Treaty and also international data policies and funding agencies' requirements nowadays demand open, unrestricted and timely access to data so as to advance Polar science.

In order to meet these requirements, scientific data must be managed carefully and professionally. NPDC has the expertise and facilities to enable this.

Practically it follows these three steps:

Archiving:

safe storage of data in durable formats, such that they remain readable and usable in the long term.

Discovery:

describe datasets in metadata catalogues so as to make their existence widely known.

Access to the data:

in collaboration with the researchers the best solution is chosen. Preferrably, data are added to a professional online database with similar data. If a natural host does not (or not yet) exist, the NPDC can provide access to the data on this site.

The NPDC is located at the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, contact details can be found here.

The NPDC represents the Netherlands in the Standing Committee on Antarctic Data Management (SCADM) and the Arctic Data Committee (ADC).