ES-DOC sprang from founding Metafor & Earth System Curator projects. Metafor was sponsored by the European Network for Earth System Modelling whilst Earth System Curator was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). More recently ES-DOC has been sponsored by the G8 funded EX-ARCH project and is now mainly sponsored by the European IS-ENES3 project and NOAA as a reflection of the growing understanding that very large scale dataset archives require a high quality documentation eco-system.
