The participants in the South Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (SAMOC) Initiative have agreed to the following sharing policy for data collected in projects that are part of SAMOC:

The overarching goal of this policy is to make high quality, fully calibrated, data available broadly to the science community and to the public as quickly as possible. Toward that end, we agree to the following:

• Data collectors are encouraged to publish data in journals that publish original data sets such as Earth System Science Data, Geoscience Data Journal, or CODATA Data Science Journal, etc. as soon as possible after collection with the objective of establishing the source institution(s) that funded the collection of the data sets.
• Data collected will be made available to other SAMOC participants, the science community, and the public immediately after collection and quality control are completed solely for the purpose of calibrating parallel observations and/or models. Users receiving data immediately agree to not use this data for publication or to include it in scientific presentations without the prior approval of the data collectors.
• Data will be made available to other SAMOC participants, the science community, and the public without restriction at the soonest possible time after collection, ideally within six months, and no longer than one year. Data will be made available through at least some of the major data centers including (but not limited to): the National Oceanographic Data Center, the British Oceanographic Data Centre, OceanSITES, etc. in addition to any individual project web pages.
• Within the SAMOC group, data recipients are encouraged to invite scientists involved in the data collection to participate in analyses and publications that depend significantly on the data they collected. This is not intended to force co-authorship; scientists who are invited to participate but who fail to significantly contribute to manuscript development will have no expectation of co-authorship. This practice of inviting participation of data collectors in analyses and publications is also encouraged with data users in the broader scientific community.

Users of SAMOC data are encouraged to keep the groups collecting data informed on how their data is being/will be used. Users are also strongly encouraged to make a good faith effort to inform others and to inform themselves about what graduate students are working on and the projects they are presently conducting in order to minimize duplication of effort to the extent possible and to protect the work of students that may require more extended development time.

This policy does not in any way prevent SAMOC data collectors from sharing their data in a less restrictive manner than is described here - this policy represents only a minimum requirement for inclusion in the SAMOC Initiative.