Many Earth science disciplines are currently experiencing the emergence of new ways of data
publication and the establishment of an information technology infrastructure for data archiving and
exchange. Building on efforts to standardize data and metadata publication in geochemistry [Staudigel et
al., 2002], here we discuss options for data publication, archiving and exchange. All of these options have
to be structured to meet some minimum requirements of scholarly publication, in particular reliability of
archival, reproducibility and falsifiability. All data publication and archival methods should strive to
produce databases that are fully interoperable and this requires an appropriate data and metadata
interchange protocol. To accomplish the latter we propose a new Metadata Interchange Format (.mif ) that
can be used for more effective sharing of data and metadata across digital libraries, data archives, and
research projects. This is not a proposal for a particular set of metadata parameters but rather of a
methodology that will enable metadata parameter sets to be easily developed and interchanged between
research organizations. Examples are provided for geochemical data as well as map images to illustrate the
flexibility of the approach.Keywords: geosciences, metadata, publication, interdisciplinary, data management, data sharingKeywords: geosciences, metadata, publication, interdisciplinary, data management, data sharin
