Interactive comment on “Technical Note: Open-paleo-data implementation pilot – The PAGES 2k special issue” by Darrell Kaufman and PAGES 2k special-issue editorial team

The authors of the Technical Note manuscript have sought to explain the procedure they claim was used to attain a consistent level of data stewardship across a special issue of the journal Climate of the Past. We are the senior authors of one of the papers published in this special issue (Freund et al., 2017) and we disagree with a number of statements in the manuscript, believe that there are important omissions in describing the procedures that were used, and disagree with the interpretation of the journal’s Data policy. The early career researchers who are authors on our paper chose not to be authors of this Comment because they are concerned that the feedback provided in this Comment might damage any future interactions that they wish to have with some members of the PAGES 2k research community.

We very much appreciate the need for input data to be made publicly available, but have a number of concerns about the procedure used for this special issue, its inflexibility, apparent inconsistency and inefficiency. While we agree with the authors that open-data sharing in paleo sciences is likely to accelerate, it is important to discuss the disadvantages as well as the potential advantages of open-data sharing. We are taking this opportunity to comment on the procedure used to attain a high level of data stewardship more generally and the challenges around this.