MareNet is an international effort to support the research, teaching and public understanding of marine science to develop, establish, and maintain a global, coherent and synergetic communication and information set of services for marine science.

MareNet focuses on professional services to assure the free flow of information to support research, teaching and public understanding.

MareNet complements the proprietary services of commercial providers by services where the free flow of professional information from and to scientists, teachers and the public is called for by the community.

MareNet information and services are provided by professional individuals (researchers and teachers), marine research groups, marine research institutions and departments at universities, and by marine science societies.

MareNet is placed under the aegis of international marine science organizations in such a way that the independence, freedom of information, professional quality of the services is assured to the community.

MareNet is a not-for-profit activity of active marine scientists and their organisations, to serve research, teaching and the public with professional marine science information.

Active contribution of information, services and their organization is open to any individual scientist, institution, or marine science society.

Active contributions from marine scientists or their organization are voluntary. Each partner finances its contributions from its own sources.

The responsibility for the correctness, professional quality, timeliness, integrity, and marine science content lies with the individual contributors.

The co-ordination bodies are responsible for the co-ordination, checking and usage of international standards of individual services.

The organization of MareNet is such that each partner has the same balanced rights for its tasks.

The set of services and its organisation are distributed, among the information and service providers.

The access to information offered by MareNet is free for anyone.

The international marine science organizations are to organize and watch over the freedom of information, the use of international standards, and the unbiased balance of national interests. The distributed organization is assumed by national societies, individual members, and service providers.

Software written for MareNet is free to be used by any scientists, marine research institution, or society for the improvement of their information and services to MareNet.

The organization is to reflect the aim of the distributed service set: little centralization, flexible, unbiased, not-for-profit, distributed.

The following institutional levels form the backbone of MareNet:

• The International Marine Science Organizations
• Their joint Committees on Information and Communication
• Its Technical Advisory Board
• Member Societies and Associations
• Individual members responsible to their local Information Coordinators
• Service Providers

MareNet will cooperate with similar professional initiatives in other fields of science.

MareNet will obey and implement accepted open international standards for the free flow, archiving, and search of information.

User-friendliness, free access, open standards, and free flow of marine science information will be approached by adopting or developing methods, tools, and standards. MareNet is a system with the following characteristics:

§ 6.1.1 Individual MareNet members or their local designated Internet coordinators make local information chosen by them available to MareNet according to standardized principles.

This can be realized in installing a local personal home page with the use of the international standard of metadata according to Dublin Core (DC) embedded into the machine readable source code. These metadata name the type of content, form, terms and conditions of a document. They are in particular used for the automatic indexing, processing, and retrieval by search machines.

The layout is left free for individual purposes. MareNet offers easy to use tools to achieve this.

The publications, or publication list of the individual MareNet member is to be integrated into MareNet by being linked to the local institution's collection of links to Marine Research documents and by adding metadata according to the international standards (DC) to it.

The layout is left free for individual purposes. MareNet offers easy to use tools to add the metadata to individual publications, or papers.

§ 6.1.2 Marine Research Institutions and Departments who join MareNet are to

a) add structure information to their institution's home page by using metadata according to international standards (DC). The layout of the home page is left free. MareNet offers easy to use tools to achieve this.

b) install sub-homepages with a collection of links leading to all document or information on document collections, teaching material, staff information, information for students, respectively. The layout and concept is left free but the structure information is to be added according to international standards (DC) for search engines. MareNet will offer easy to use tools to achieve this.

c) be encouraged to install and maintain a local gatherer which allows the individual institute to pick the information to be addressed by the worldwide MareNet.

All marine science information of MareNet is kept, stored and maintained by its creators at their local institution's server. MareNet members retain their ownership and copyright of their data. They agree to make the respective metadata available to the entire MareNet services.

MareNet gathers and processes available local information of marine research institutes to make them globally accessible. Searching for the information is provided by the MareNet providers, which are distributed worldwide according to their expertise and interest. MareNet is a distributed system with no bias to any center or nation.

Only open formats of information presentation are accepted to be part of the information processed by MareNet servers. Special attention will be paid to assure a seamless integration to other learned fields information.

MareNet aims at a simple and intuitive user interface, a powerful retrieval mechanism, useful tools for robust and simple input of documents and metadata.

MareNet members commit themselves to offer high-quality professional marine science information only. They stay responsible as marine scientists for their web-based content. Same holds for Marine Research Institutions.

MareNet is a grassroots activity driven by individuals and institutions. It is open to any interested professional marine scientist to enter as member, any marine research institution to enter as an institution and any active group willing to develop and offer services. Its committees will assure the organization, the development, and the quality and unbiased nature of the whole service.

MareNet activities are not-for-profit.

All interested professional marine research institutions, groups and individual scientists can offer content or content information and can take part in the MareNet activities.

Access to MareNet information is open, free of charge.

All standards, recommendations developed within MareNet will be made publicly available in the Web.

Programs of any service will be freely available as open source code to all partners in MareNet to use for future services within MareNet.

Development of the MareNet will be pragmatic and on a step by step basis. New partners will sign the charter and enter the respective bodies alongside the existing partners.

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