OpenTopography Data Hosting Policy

As an NSF-funded lidar data facility, OpenTopography’s primary emphasis is on Earth science-related, research-grade, topography and bathymetry data. The scope of data that falls within this domain is not specifically defined, and data priorities are dictated by feedback from the OpenTopography user community, as well as our Advisory Committee. For those data that OpenTopography does not have the resources to host, we encourage registration of these in our community contributed data catalog so that they are discoverable by OpenTopography users.

Minimum Data Requirements:

• Broadly Earth science related
• Research-oriented
• In the public domain and without restrictions on use or redistribution
• Documented and meaningfully organized. Data to be distributed by OpenTopography must have accompanying metadata that describes organization of files, data schemas and coordinates, and basic attribution and citation information.

Data Submission Process - Instructions on submitting data to OpenTopography.

Data Backups and Archiving:

OpenTopography is funded by the National Science Foundation as a data facility, not a long-term data archive. Funding is provided on multi-year basis with periodic renewal via peer reviewed proposal. All data hosted by OpenTopography are periodically backed up to SDSC storage Cloud for the duration of the project.

All OpenTopography hosted datasets are assigned a persistent Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), maintained by the California Digital Libraries/EZID, which enhances data citation and facilitates long term archiving of data.