Increasingly, the conduct of science requires strong international scientific partnerships and sharing of knowledge, information, data, and other assets. This is particularly true in the geosciences where the highly coupled nature of the earth system and the need to understand global environmental processes and their regional linkages have brought to the fore the importance of and growing need for collaborations and partnerships across national and continental boundaries.

The climate system is far too complex a puzzle to be unraveled by individual researchers, groups or even nations. It is increasingly important to allow disparate organizations around the world to share data in an open manner, using common "community agreed" standards for web-based exchange. Collaboration on simulation software development is equally important. Truly integrated models of the Earth system require expertise that is beyond any individual institute, hence the need for reusable libraries/components/programs that are easily coupled to others.

The importance of institutional collaboration is resulting in international team efforts involving networked scientists and data providers to provide free, open, authoritative sources of quality data and software that are available with reliable and timely access for peer review and for collaborative purposes. Several of these collaborations and related technologies are presented in this session.