Data exchange facilitated

A recent Commentary1 in Nature Geoscience points out a gap between the principles and actions of data sharing in geoscience, and urges professional support for the archiving of data during its creation. We agree with these points, but we would like to add that attention should also be paid to the interoperability of data. Data should be discoverable, accessible, decodable, understandable and usable, and data sharing should be legal and ethical for all participants2. Without interoperability in this sense, local geoscience data archives will run the risk of becoming separate islands in a data deluge3.