The he University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) is a unique organization nearing its 30th anniversary. It continues to walk a tight rope between the federal agencies and academia, between competition and collegiality. Evolving from a Stratton Commission recommendation, UNOLS forged a solid niche in the management of a virtual research fleet. Institutional members maintain a federation type management style yet agree to coordinate their schedules, adhere to common safety standards, exchange scientific parties, and plan for future ship replacements. At the same time, members are hustling to outshine competing institutions in the quest for full schedules. Science is a winner in the process as ship managers strive forever improving operations, high safety and maintenance standards, new scientific tools and instrumentation and an accommodating, professional crew. Where appropriate, standardization has been accomplished yet each ship maintains a personality or character that is tailored to its individual mission expertise.

Bash, J.F. 2001. University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System. Oceanography 14(2):23–25, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2001.37.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.