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 datasets including data for whole rocks, glasses, mineral chemistry, and inclusion data.

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 recommendations on how to document analytical procedures and data quality of geochemical datasets.  EarthChem is currently working with editors of major Earth science journals to implement theser recommendations as standards for reporting geochemical data in the peer-reviewed literature. 

You can download spreadsheet templates that were designed on basis of the recommendations of the EarthChem Working Group.  These templates will you compile and organize your data and metadata for submission to EarthChem.

Sample Metadata (XLS 216KB)
Bulk Elemental Analyses (XLS 260KB)
Bulk Isotope Analyses (XLS 260KB)
in situ Elemental Analyses (XLS 268KB)
in situ Isotope Analyses (XLS 260KB)

Please contact 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.