CORRESPONDENCE WITH U.S. NSF     

December 11, 2003          

Dear Dr. Verardo,

Any progress on this? 

I would have thought that the issue pertained more to the obligation of grantees to publicly archive their data, as opposed to the issue of intellectual property ownership. The 1991 US GRCP Policy Statement made it abundantly clear that public archiving was a major policy objective and worried about dilatory principal investigators.

I think that the paleo-climate program is an excellent program and the public archiving by the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology is superb. However, it appears that some of your grantees - I've mentioned Mann, Bradley and Hughes - are dilatory in compliance with the above policy and I think that it's important that they and others comply with their archiving obligations. I am sure that we are in agreement on this.

I've also noticed that Lonnie Thompson has not archived his important and frequently cited data from Dunde, Guliya and Dasuopu ice cores, some data going back almost 15 years. This should be rectified.

From my point of view, the ideal outcome would be that you prod dilatory grantees into completing the required public archiving, which must surely be a desired outcome for you as well. 

Regards, Steve McIntyre