Data preparation for curation should not be optional and data citation should be part of any publication - these are the new norms (doi:10.1017/S0954102010000520).In the efforts to publish data and thus make it citable recently various new inventions were made. The Open Access publisher Copernicus has established a peer-reviewed journal which solely aims at making comprehensive data collections publicly available (http://earth-system-science-data.net). Publications must include a detailed description of methods and quality; mandatory is a stable link pointing to the data in a trusted archive through a persistent identifier (handle, Digital Object Identifier DOI).The stable linking of data through persistent identifiers necessitated the foundation of a registration agency for data-DOI. The international organisation DataCite was established in 2009 (http://www.datacite.org), a year later having nearly a million DOI registered.Consequently following the OECD recommendations for access to research data and the STM statement on data accessibility, publishers have recently started to archive data supplements to publications in external archives and to make it visible on the publications splash page through a linking via the DOI of the publication. Even for commercial journals, data are available in Open Access (example: doi:10.1016/j.margeo.2004.03.017).As an outcome of a project of the TIB (National Library for Science and Technology), some repositories now offer the opportunity to publish data citable with metadata and extended abstract through its data library system (example: doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.138789).