The MagIC Online Database: Improving the Archive Quality via a New Review System

The Magnetics Information Consortium (MagIC) is committed to providing the paleomagnetic, rock magnetic, and affiliated scientific communities on-line access to peer-reviewed, published, and raw data, and interpretations, along with online analytics and visualization tools. The MagIC Database (http://earthref.org/MAGIC/) is growing rapidly with new rock and paleomagnetic datasets being uploaded daily. Users can upload contributions for private viewing in the context of published data in the MagIC Database and can elect to share an unpublished dataset with a small group of users (e.g. collaborators, journal reviewers, editors, etc.). Once the data are published, the contribution can be associated with a citable reference and made visible to the general public. Rock and paleomagnetic studies vary considerably in complexity and types of results. To accommodate these variable datasets, the MagIC Data Model has evolved into a large collection of tables with hundreds of fields available. Many of these are recommended for use, but not required, providing great flexibility to accommodate minimal information available from legacy datasets at the same time as detailed modern studies. These published and contributed results are priceless to the scientific community, but are not easily accessible for further use without appropriate metadata describing the methods employed in the study. MagIC has developed an internal review system to rapidly assess the accuracy and completeness of the metadata used and to ensure appropriate placement and descriptions of data in the contributions. Experts in the field have volunteered as MagIC editors and reviewers: they comment on the technicalities of archiving the data, (not their scientific merit which remains a task for the journal peer-review system), and provide feedback to the contributor. Successfully reviewed contributions are free of data entry errors and misunderstandings about the data model, and fully document the methods in the study. They are flagged in the MagIC Search Interface (http://earthref.org/MAGIC/search) so that users can be aware of the review status of the data they access. The MagIC Database is continuously striving to enrich and promote rock- and paleomagnetic research by providing the community with tools for retrieving and analyzing previous studies, as well as for organizing and collaborating on new activities.