A basic requirement for advancing research is free and unrestricted international sharing of high-quality, long-term, and standardized data and information products. The WGMS basically follows the FAIR Principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) for data stewardship, as described by Wilkinson et al. 2016.

The International Science Council (ISC) endorses as a general policy the fundamental principal of full and open exchange of data and information for scientific and educational purposes. The WGMS is a regular member of the World Data System (ISC-WDS) and is certified as CoreTrustSeal trustworthy data repository. The TRUST Principles (Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability and Technology) provide a common framework to facilitate discussion and implementation of best practice in digital preservation by all stakeholders (Lin et al. 2020).

All data submitted to the WGMS are considered public domain and are made digitally available (near-real time) through the operational services at no cost. Thus, WGMS data are open access under the requirement of correct citation (see database version), which corresponds to a CC BY 4.0 license by Creative Commons.

The data may be subject to errors and inaccuracies. WGMS, therefore, strongly recommends performing data quality checks and, in cases of ambiguities, contacting the WGMS staff as well as the investigators and sponsoring agencies of the data. The use of data and information from WGMS requires acknowledgement of the WGMS and/or the original investigators and sponsoring agencies according to the available meta-information.