This talk examines the diplomacy of scientific data by focussing on the history of the Committee on Data in Science and Technology (CODATA) of the International Council of Scientific Unions. Established in 1966, CODATA has since then been the chief engine of coordination in the international provision of scientific data, also liaising with the scientific unions and other international organizations. The talk focusses especially on CODATA’s early history, drawing on the examination of its untapped collection of archival papers, and focuses for agreements on data standardization, provisions on data circulation, and initiatives to make data more available to the international scientific community.

While these initiatives were instrumental in the growth, globally, of the scientific enterprise, they also introduced some of global science’s more problematic aspects, especially with regards to asymmetrical representation and influence of national groups in the committee. CODATA was set up and developed with membership explicitly restricted to national organizations with advanced data-making capability hence limiting participation initiative to a handful of national groups from leading scientific powers. This restrictive membership provided an orientation too since CODATA prioritized data collections and practices aligned to interests and priorities of these groups while overlooking others.

The talk thus uses the CODATA example to critically appraises claims on scientific diplomacy as a wholly positive force in scientific and foreign affairs, suggesting that the past diplomatic activities connected to scientific data restricted this coordination to the few that could afford to be included in collaborative exercises while marginalizing many others.

Data is essential to ocean science. Oceanographers gather data on the marine environment using a variety of tools: satellites, remote sensors, and ship-borne instruments. For centuries knowledge of the ocean, historically captured on hydrographic charts, was a closely guarded state secret, key to geopolitical and geostrategic power at sea. Although there was limited bilateral cooperation and ocean data sharing, information access was often restricted and costly. The concept of free-at-source global ocean data sharing emerged only during the Cold War.

Following on from the International Geophysical Years “big data collecting binge” (Shapley, 1960), the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange in 1961. Intended to create only oceanography guidelines, the IODE struggled to enforce the free flow of data into the World Oceanographic Data Centres.

Global South nations were also sceptical about the true equity of an ocean governance regime created whilst they were not yet independent, and at the UN Conferences on the Law of the Sea (1973-82) ocean science itself came under scrutiny. The heart of these debates around the “freedom” of marine science was the equity and justice that did or did not exist in the ocean data-sharing regime. When the new Law of the Sea opened for signature in 1984, the ocean data regime had evolved from one of moral imperative to share and collaborate, through a system of intergovernmental governance, and finally entered a politico-legal regime of mandated ocean data sharing.

The paper examines the origins and first years of operation of the nuclear literature indexing database, the International Nuclear Information System (INIS), based on IAEA sources. It shows that diplomatic as well as scientific and technological factors catered for creating the database in the IAEA at the end of the 1960s and for countries to elect to join it. INIS became one of the first global infrastructures for the exchange of information and data on a general level, becoming for example the primary inspiration for the FAO's AGRIS information database in spite of the asymmetry of inputs and outputs between member states INIS entailed. We argue that by challenging the USSR's technological dominance, INIS functioned as a tool for hidden integration between the Western and Eastern blocs during the Cold War, but, that said, INIS did not serve as effectively to integrate newly independent countries into its network, suggesting how the fault line for technopolitical tension had shifted from an East-West to a North-South orientation by the early 1970s.