Paper submissions are invited, by 1 March 2019, for a Special Issue of the Polar Data Journal on "Data Rescue" for the International Polar Year (IPY 2007-2008), published by the National Institute of Polar Research.
The International Polar Year (IPY 2007-2008) was the world’s most diverse international science programme which explored the polar regions through observation, research and analysis. Several different aspects of polar scientific data have great significance for global environmental research in this century. The huge amount of scientific data accumulated during IPY should be its most important legacy, but only if they are preserved and made available.
A considerable number of scientific results from IPY have emerged and numerous scientific papers have already been published. However, this has not always been true of the data behind the papers. So, a decade on from the end of IPY, a special issue on the "Data Rescue" of IPY projects has been proposed. This special issue covers topics on recent developments in all disciplines of scientific data collected in and around the polar regions during IPY and beyond. You are invited to submit articles addressing the process of polar data collection, acquisition, processing, and management so that these data will be (re)used by other researchers and add value to the preliminary published results from them.
The Editors are taking a broad view of data “rescue” so that, in addition to identifying and revealing closed, hidden, and at-risk data, they also want to formalize, highlight, and better steward currently open data. This could include moving data from a project website to a formal archive, or providing detailed descriptions of ongoing data streams that make the data more useful, or provide lessons learned for other data providers on how to make data more discoverable, open, linked, useful, and safe or fair.
Full information on the Special Issue, including details of the Editors, the scope of the issue, and the topics and keywords for submissions, are available on the Polar Data Journal website and can be downloaded as a pdf.
