This page covers some of the overall principles that the project is trying to implement. In part this page is here to answer questions about what the rules or policies of the project are. Most of these have to do with the fact that the ICE-D databases are more informal than conventional scientific data archives and are pretty vague about how data get in the databases, and what you are supposed, or not supposed, to do with them once they are there. This seems weird to many scientists who are used to working with conventional archives.

This page is supposed to explain the underlying thinking behind our approach, which is mostly based on the principle that the ICE-D project is supposed to be a forward-looking research tool and not a backward-looking archive. It's buried in a relatively obscure corner of the wiki because the point of this project is to organize cosmogenic-nuclide data in a useful way, not editorialize about the philosophy of geoscience data management. However, some of this background is needed to answer fairly common questions about the project.

This page is incomplete.

Why should I trust that these data are correct?

Why is there no versioning?

Why can't I exactly reproduce exposure ages in a past publication from data that are supposed to be from that publication?

Does anyone review these data?

Why are there unpublished data here?

Can I put my unpublished data here? Should I?

If I do some kind of synoptic analysis on a large data set that contains some unpublished data, can I publish it?

If we know something, there is no reason not to put it in the database

Users as developers

Trust but verify

A forward-looking research tool, not a backward-looking archive