Distributed environmental data curation - piecemeal or necessity

The need for archiving environmental data is rapidly increasing due to requirements by journals and funding agencies, and the overall recognition of the value of data by different communities, including scientific researchers, policy makers, and the public. Accordingly, a great variety of data archive solutions are currently being developed. Examples of the current solutions include: 1)university wide archives and libraries taking on scientific data curation, 2) research networks employing data managers, 3) single investigator labs asking grad students to archive data, 4) consulting companies offering their services. In this landscape of boutique approaches we would like to start the discussion of the following issues:

• Distributed data curation - piecemeal or natural evolution?
  • Do we have all tools, standards, recommendations, policies to achieve the needed efficiency in a distributed model?
  • What kinds of collaboration and governance models would be most effective?
• Is the alternative - a data “center” for the environmental sciences - a better solution?
• Role of large initiatives (NASA, NOAA, DataONE, NEON, …)
• Possible business models