Facilitating Free and Open Exchange of Seismological Data

Raymond J. Willemann and David W. Simpson
IRIS Consortium, Washington, DC, USA

IRIS is a consortium of more than 100 US universities with research programs in seismology. The Consortium and its facilities have been leaders for more than twenty years in fostering free and open exchange of seismological and other geophysical data. IRIS’s commitment to open data “begins at home”: from the outset, all of the data collected by stations of the IRIS/USGS Global Seismographic have been freely available as quickly as technology allows (except for a few stations in countries that artificially delay data transmission) and data collected using IRIS’s portable instruments have been available within two years concluding each deployment. IRIS has developed technology to facilitate data exchange: its Data Management Center makes all of the data that it holds available in internationally recognized formats and has developed and freely distributed software for downloading data files in these formats and using them in research projects. IRIS has also supported institutional arrangements that encourage data exchange: it is a founding member of the Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks and its Data Management Center serves as the Federation’s international archive. IRIS’s portable instruments have been used in collaborative experiments around the world, and numerous international colleagues have used the freely-distributed data from those experiments. New IRIS activities to support international data exchange include

• Increasing the number and role of foreign affiliates by proactively seeking out institutions that fulfill key roles in global seismology.
• Adopting a new mission statement that explicitly supports free and open access to data and asking each US and foreign affiliate to declare its support of the mission.
• Making long-term, no-cost loans of instruments that facilitate data exchange available to its US and foreign affiliates.
• Running training workshops and participating in other training to build the capacity, so that stakeholders developing countries can obtain data that are already available and use them effectively, as well as share their own data with colleagues around the world.
• Developing a new strategic plan for IRIS’s portable instrumentation program, in part to facilitate joint use of portable instruments from different countries, such as recent experiments in Europe and potential joint use with ChinArray instruments.

Collectively, these activities promise to further expand the availability of data that are required for reliable hazard analysis and prompt earthquake alert and tsunami warning systems, as well as fundamental research in Earth structure and earthquake physics.

Keywords: Seismology, Open data