Become a Publisher on geodata.gov

After you have registered with geodata.gov, you can save your preferences on the portal. If you want to participate in the portal and share your geospatial resources by publishing metadata about those resources, or if you want to submit data requests or planned acquisitions you have to register as a publisher.

Responsibilities of a Publisher

Registering as a publisher consists of providing more detail about you and the organization you represent. We also ask that you adhere to a number of responsibilities, including:

1. Keep your content current - Without up-to-date content, the portal looses its value as people will not find what is relevant at a given time.
2. Be responsible for the content you publish - Accept responsibility for and take protection against the publishing of unauthorized, sensitive, or inappropriate content entered or maintained on your behalf. The information on geodata.gov is maintained by a large number of users. Maintaining a sense of responsibility by all who participate is essential for its success. If the catalog is cluttered with inappropriate or irrelevant information, it will not be able to meet the goal of providing quick access to the right information.
3. Support metadata harvesting - Metadata harvesting is the semi-automated process of collecting metadata from remote repositories and adding that metadata to the geodata.gov central catalog from where it can be searched. Supporting the harvesting of metadata will allow the geodata.gov catalog to be updated with your new or modified content and it will also take the burden from you of having to publish metadata directly to the portal.
4. Share information you are allowed to share - geodata.gov is a publicly accessible portal. Realize that by publishing your content to the portal, the public gets to know about your geospatial resources. You may restrict access to the resources you publish on geodata.gov. This way, people may learn about resources you have available through the metadata you publish to geodata.gov, but you maintain control over actually accessing the resources.
5. Maintain your resources - By publishing resources to geodata.gov, people may find that your resources are useful to them and will reference those resources in their applications. Please maintaining your resources in addition to maintaining the metadata for those resources.

How to Register as a Publisher

Publishing is only available to users with a geodata.gov account. If you do not have an account, please see the Create a New Account Help for instructions on creating your new account.

To become a publisher on geodata.gov:

1. Log in to your geodata.gov account with your User ID and Password
2. Click the My Tools tab
3. Click the Become a Publisher link
4. Review the Statement of Agreement and click 'I accept' to continue, or click 'I do not accept' to cancel.
5. Complete the User Profile
6. Click the 'Save Publisher Information' button at the bottom of the page

   Required fields are marked with an asterisk (*).

After all required fields have been verified, you will be able to publish metadata to the portal, or register a site for harvesting.