Marine and coastal research has developed from local and sporadic limited measurements to long-term surveys and monitoring campaigns - consequently to the data-intensive and integrative science of today. The linkage of data and access to data beyond disciplinary boundaries became essential for marine research and coastal management. Therefore sufficient national and international data infrastructures are fundamental for central and easy access to the variety of existing, but distributed datasets in marine and coastal research. The Marine Network for Integrated Data Access - MaNIDA provides a national networked approach in accessing and mining of federated marine research data infrastructures together with data management strategies and data workflows. In that course the consortium conceptualized and developed the a data portal for coherent discovery, view, download and dissemination of scientific data and publications. The Data Portal German Marine Research is based on a central harvesting and interfacing approach by connecting distributed data sources. Since the German network of content providers have distinct objectives and mandates for storing data and information (e.g. long‐term data preservation, near real time data, publication repositories), we have to cope with heterogeneous metadata in terms of syntax and semantic, data types and formats as well as access solutions. Therefore we defined a set of core metadata elements which are common to our content providers and useful for discovery and building relationships. Existing catalogues for various types of vocabularies are being used to assure the mapping to community‐wide used terms. The web application allows browsing by e.g. monitoring platforms, vessels and date for exploring data and research gaps. Data-related information is homogenously presented to the user and adaptable to specific disciplines. Data access and dissemination information is available as direct access or web services or data download link.