Antarctic Research and Data Management in Finland

Management of Research Data and Open Science

According to the Antarctic Treaty, all states conducting research in Antarctica must ensure that research data is appropriately stored and freely available, and that it is properly described in an international database. Proper management and preservation of research data are crucial for the openness of science and research.

Antarctic Master Directory and etsin.fairdata.fi

Research data collected from Antarctica should have metadata stored in a way that it is freely available, and a link to the actual data should be included in the description when the data is available.

Up to now, metadata has been stored in the Antarctic Master Directory (AMD), but it is now recommended to be stored in the fairdata.fi portal organized by the Ministry of Education and Culture, where it is also possible to store the data itself.

AMD is part of NASA's Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) and contains approximately 11,000 descriptions of research data collected from Antarctica. The system includes 53 Finnish metadata descriptions.

Submitting Metadata

• In the Fairdata.fi portal, metadata is stored using the Qvain tool.
• In AMD, metadata is stored in the database using this form.

Find data and more information:

• Finnish Research Data in Antarctic Master Directory and in
• Fairdata.fi portal 
• Metadata in AMD is also available in Google dataset search.
• Polar Data Search - amalgamation of multidisciplinary repositories that host some form of polar data, which are then indexed into a single search interface.
• Finnish Antarctic Research Program FINNARP

Contact person

The Arctic Centre serves as a contact point and provides guidance and training in metadata storage.

Arto Vitikka: firstname.lastaname()ulapland.fi
Tel: +358-040-5272 436

Updated: 23.11. 2023