How to Contribute

EarthChem welcomes your contribution

EarthChem is a community resource, and as such encourages investigators to actively contribute to the EarthChem system. There are several ways to actively support EarthChem:

• Contribute your own data or data compilations.
• Encourage your colleagues to contribute their data.
• Build new datasets in collaboration with EarthChem. EarthChem can provide technical assistance.
• Provide comments and suggestions to improve EarthChem and the federated databases. Suggest new datasets that are of high scientific value and have not yet been included in the EarthChem databases.
• Send us information how you have used EarthChem and its member databases for research and education.

Become a collaborator

EarthChem's goal is to advance discovery, accessibility, and utility of geochemical data in science and education. In order to achieve this goal, EarthChem invites collaborations with academic individuals, projects and initiatives, national statutory bodies, and commercial entities that generate, archive and/or provide access to geochemical data. EarthChem offers different levels of collaboration, based on the level of accessibility to a collaborator's data at the EarthChem portal, which can range from full access to complete data holdings at the EarthChem portal XML database to simple URL links to data sets in the EarthChem Library.

Read our Policy for EarthChem Collaborations and Partnerships PDF 92KB

Submit your data

EarthChem welcomes contributions of geochemical data for whole rocks, glasses, minerals, and inclusions.

Datasets can be submitted in spreadsheet form and need to include supplementary information about the analyzed samples, the analytical procedure and data quality, and the source of the data (publicationos or analysts).  The EarthChem Working Group 'Reporting of Geochemical Data' has produced a set of recommendationson how to document analytical procedures and data quality of geochemical datasets. 

The Editors Roundtable*, a group of editors, publishers, and database providers has been meeting since 2007 to discuss policies to improve geochemical data publication practices.  The group will hold a meeting at the 2008 AGU Fall Meeting to present the new joint editorial policy statement that establishes a common set of standards for reporting geochemical data, with the overall aim of better serving the scientific community. The policy addresses the problem of inconsistency and incompleteness of data and metadata in publications, and will help to facilitate the incorporation of data into digital data collections.

Download the Policy for Publication of Geochemical Data (PDF)

(*includes Chemical Geology, CMP, EPSL, GCA, G-cubed, Geology, J. Pet., Nature, Science) 

Downloadable Excel templates for data submission:
Electron Probe Microanalysis
Trace Elements and Radiogenic Isotopes
Stable Isotopes
Major Elements (XRF)

Questions? Contact us at info@earthchem.org and the EarthChem staff will help you compile the correct information.

Send comments & suggestions

EarthChem welcomes user feedback regarding every aspect of EarthChem system. This includes functionality and user-friendliness of the query interface, data content, or web site structure and content. Please send your comments and suggestions to info@earthchem.org.