First Paragraph
Over the last 50 years, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) has had a profound influence upon the willingness of United Nations Member States to share and provide access to their international and interdisciplinary oceanographic data. (For an early history and review of IOC achievements, see Roll, 1979.) Ocean science over the last half century has been transformed from a predominately modular, single-disciplinary, and individualistic science into a national and multinational interdisciplinary enterprise (Briscoe, 2008; Powell, 2008). The transformation began slowly, but as computing power increased, the pace accelerated, and along with these alterations came shifts in cultural practices regarding the sharing of data.