The aim of this data policy is to facilitate operation and use of the information platform eOcean.org [Marine Geology and Environmental Database Platform] by the research community as an Open Access archive, library and publishing system for data from earth system research. This policy recognizes the benefits of providing free and open access to good quality data from earth and environmental sciences for future use in global change studies, research projects, and operational services such as portals, search engines and library catalogs.

The eOcean.org is supported by the Ministry of Education, China, and operated by the State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University and the State Key Laboratory for Mineral Deposits Research, Nanjing University for the benefit of the scientific community. The operating institutes encourage the widest possible use of eOcean.org as a data library, in order to best realize its potential value.

The guiding principle of eOcean.org is free and open access to its content by research and education communities in non commercial activities. For any data, provided by eOcean.org, the format and description of a data set must ensure its most widespread and easiest use by the scientific community.

Projects, institutes as well as individual scientists are encouraged to upload any relevant data for long-term archiving.

Users who have downloaded data are urged to properly use the data set citation and/or quote the related reference.