Since 1992 PANGAEA® serves as an archive for all types of geoscientific and environmental data. From the beginning the PANGAEA group started initiatives and aimed at an organisation structure which - beyond the technical structure and operation of the system - would help to improve the quality and general availability of scientific data. Project data management is done since 1996. 2001 the ICSU World Data Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (WDC-MARE) was founded and since 2003 - together with other German WDC - the group was working on the development of data publications as a new publication type. To achieve interoperability with other data centers and portals the system was adapted to global information standards. PANGAEA® has implemented a number of community specific data portals. 2007 - under the coordination of the PANGAEA® group - an initiative for networking all WDC was started. On the long range ISCU supports plans to develop the WDC system into a global network of publishers and open access libraries for scientific data.