At the inaugural meeting of the new PAGES Databoard, a list of planned actions and data policies was drawn up. Members in attendance at the inaugural meeting included representatives from all of the major data archives, such as The World Data Center for Paleoclimatology in Boulder, USA, the World Data Center for Marine Environmental Data and PANGAEA in Germany as well as MEDIAS-France. In addition, representatives from thematic data collection efforts such as the African, European and North American Pollen databases and the IMAGES program were also present. Although participation in the workshop was necessarily limited, membership in the PAGES Databoard is open to all interested scientists and organizations. A full list of the proposed new PAGES Databoard policies, which were subsequently approved by the PAGES Scientific Steering Committee, is available here.

Here we highlight a few of the major outcomes of the meeting:

Members of the PAGES Data System will work to encourage and facilitate access and exchange of paleoenvironmental data by:

• establishing networks for data management,
• providing tools to facilitate data contribution and improve data utility
• increasing data sharing through development of common formats for data and metadata interchange

New members are always welcome in the PAGES Data System, their management activities should:

• be developed in coordination with existing data management programs and centers
• use existing databases and systems where appropriate
• use the metadata profiles and interchange systems approved by the PAGES Databoard for paleo-metadata management and exchange
• establish a protocol to define the expected flow of data from scientists, through discipline- or project-based data programs, to long-term archive
• fully document data following established standards for metadata and data

In the near future, members of the Databoard will cooperate to create a web-based metadata portal compatible with, and linked to, the data archives maintained by all members. This portal, which will be mirrored by all the participating organizations including the PAGES IPO, will allow scientists to search for, or submit, any type of quantitative paleodata using simple keywords. This tool will allow fast and easy access to paleodata archived around the world. The success of this initiative depends on the cooperation of various database managers, which was achieved during this first Databoard meeting, but more importantly, it depends on the willingness of individual scientists to submit their data to a participating archive. As one way to support this initiative, PAGES will request that the data used to create any figure published in a science highlights in PAGES News, be made publicly available in a participating data archive.

Isabelle Larocque, Mark Eakin, Michael Diepenbroek, Michel Hoepfner