Requirements

NOAA requires that environmental data collected or created under NOAA-funded grants or cooperative agreements be made discoverable by and accessible to the general public. Data must be made publicly accessible in a timely fashion, typically within two years, free of charge or at minimal cost that is no more than the cost of distribution to the user, except where limited by law, regulation, policy, or national security requirements. Data should be available in at least one machine-readable format, preferably a widely-used or open-standard format, and should also be accompanied by machine-readable documentation (metadata), preferably based on widely-used or international standards.

Applicants are strongly encouraged to use existing data centers and data portals to archive and disseminate their data. Submission of data to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is one way to meet this requirement (see Options below for more details). Note: NCEI is not obligated to accept all submissions and may charge a fee, particularly for large or unusual datasets. The costs of data preparation, accessibility and/or archiving, if any, should be included in your proposal budget.

For non-open access scholarly articles, applicants are required to submit the final pre-publication manuscripts of scholarly articles produced entirely or primarily with NOAA funding to the NOAA Institutional Repository after acceptance, and no later than upon publication. Such manuscripts shall be made publicly available by NOAA one-year after publication by the journal.