“…Make data available. So what do you do? Many disciplines, universities, and federal agencies have started to build repositories, slowly filling caverns of data to mine. The best ones allow for easy uploading and a pathway to making these observations machine-readable, with provenance information and metadata inseparable from the pudding that is your data. Well-known repositories include DRYAD, figshare, KNB, DOE Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center for Biogeochemical Dynamics, iPlant, and DataOne. Some scientists are also resorting to places like GitHub, originally built for software code development, but which is now also a decent home for data, figures, and metadata, even labeled with hashtags (see #openexperiment, for example). Some disciplines have created their own metadata formats and units, like Ecological Metadata Language (EML) in Biogeosciences, or Climate and Forecast convention NetCDF in Atmospheric Sciences. Read up on these. Be intrepid and share. Find your repository. Learn about licenses for sharing like Creative Commons. And then you’ll be ready the next time an editor remarks, like in those old Wendy’s ads, “Nice manuscript, but where’s the data?” —Ankur R. Desai, Editor, Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences; email: [email protected] [thanks to Darlene]