NERC's Science Information Strategy - promoting information fusion across the Environmental Sciences

The Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) in the UK is responsible for funding environmental research in universities and running a number of research centres; such as the British Geological Survey. Data and information created by this research, and deposited by third parties, is managed by a number of environmental data centres for the purpose of preserving research outputs and promoting their re-use, re-purposing and information fusion. These data centres are: British Atmospheric Data Centre (http://badc.nerc.ac.uk) British Oceanographic Data Centre (http://bodc.nerc.ac.uk) Environmental Information Data Centre (http://eidc.nerc.ac.uk) National Geoscience Data Centre (http://ngdc.nerc.ac.uk) NERC Earth Observation Data Centre (http://neodc.nec.ac.uk) Polar Data Centre (http://pdc.anerc.ac.uk) The NERC Science Information Strategy (SIS) has been created to provide the framework for NERC to work more closely and effectively with its scientific communities in delivering data and information management services to support its 5 year science strategy, the Next Generation Science for Planet Earth. The strategy focuses on the continuing development of NERC’s information management processes and sets the context under which all of its science data and information activities will be carried out in the future. The anticipated benefits of the science information strategy that promote information fusion include: (1) Easier discovery and access to the data that underpin the objective scientific evidence; (2) A clear understanding of stakeholders' needs and aspirations; (3) A common understanding of the data of high value to NERC's mission and clear processes to ensure such data is ingested, managed and disseminated to the environmental science community; (4) Greater commonality of approach, development and sharing of infrastructure; leading to simpler information fusion; (5) A clear understanding of the intellectual property rights; and (6) Compliance with legislation such as INSPIRE which designed to promote information fusion across Europe. The science information strategy has been designed to make information easy to discover, freely available and in formats that the community requires for ready re-use, re-purposing and information fusion.