The SWERVE vessels belong to organisations that have the mandate to manage the data collected from their infrastructure, and have data policies that align with their operations. SMHI, SU, UmU and SLU have monitoring requirements with existing pathways for data to users (e.g. dBotnia database). Oden is working with SMHI and SND to ensure their data is made available with metadata, quality control and interoperability. SGU collects data with potential national security risk; the data is free, but access is restricted according to Swedish Law. A key action for SWERVE is to develop the governing document for data policy and management to establish expectations for SWERVE data. The data policy will be a common specification by joining the current data policies from each organisation. The work with developing the data policy was started during the summer 2024.

SWERVE will ensure that all data is stored safely and is published openly in near real-time if possible, or within a reasonable time after the research results. SWERVE will ensure that data collected by the Ferrybox, CTD, Weather Station, Argo floats and/or MVP from the vessels will be quality controlled, formatted into a standard format and delivered to international repositories, according to the FAIR data principle. If new variables and/or sensors become part of ‘standardised’ data collection, they will be delivered to international data repositories where and when appropriate. Data that is published through the SWERVE infrastructure is considered public, free to use for everyone, with terms of licence following Creative commons CC0 https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en.

The terms of licence grants the user the right to use, share, modify and build on data, even for commercial use. The general 27/58 SWERVE Description of the Infrastructure 15 exception following information classification of data is that security classified data considered to be geographical information is not made public. Data collected by the ship user for the purpose of a specific research project must still adhere to the SWERVE data management policy. For samples collected that require later analysis through a funded research project, SWERVE will track the publication of the resulting research data. SWERVE will provide advice and guidance to users for the appropriate repositories for their research data (e.g. biological data to SBDI)

The type of data collected by research vessels is broad; a physical sample (e.g. sediment core), biological sample (e.g. plankton), images (e.g. multibeam), or single data points (e.g. water properties). Data can also be classified as underway (i.e. collected while the ship is moving), which means the data can be made available in near-real time (important for weather and marine forecasting). 

The type of data collected by research vessels is broad; a physical sample (e.g. sediment core), biological sample (e.g. plankton), images (e.g. multibeam), or single data points (e.g. water properties). Data can also be classified as underway (i.e. collected while the ship is moving), which means the data can be made available in near-real time (important for weather and marine forecasting).