Article III of the Antarctic Treaty states that “the Contracting Parties agree to proceed […] with the exchange of observations of scientific results on Antarctica, which shall be freely available”. To comply with this requirement, the National Polar Data Center was created in 1998, whose main objective is the administration and custody of the metadata and data generated by Spanish scientific projects in the polar field. In addition, it is responsible for powering international databases according to the standards of the SCAR Standing Committee on Antactic Data Management (SC-ADM) and the Arctic Data Committee (ADC).
The overall purpose of the SC-ADM and ADC is to promote and facilitate international collaboration towards free, ethically open, sustainable and timely access to Arctic and Antarctic data through useful, usable and interoperable systems.