The SAGE Facility (Seismological Facility for the Advancement of Geoscience) is the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded archive for global seismological and related geophysical data, operated today by the EarthScope Consortium. For most of its history it was known by the name of its operating institution, IRIS (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology), and researchers, repository lists, and older citations will still encounter both names. Understanding what changed, what didn’t, and how the archive fits into the broader domain-repository landscape matters for anyone citing seismic data, writing a data management plan that names this facility, or evaluating it as a deposit target.
From IRIS to EarthScope Consortium: what actually changed
On January 1, 2023, IRIS merged with UNAVCO (the NSF-funded geodesy consortium) to form the EarthScope Consortium. The two organizations’ boards began exploring the combination in 2019 and concluded that a single consortium would better serve the geophysical research community than two separate, overlapping ones. The merger did not create a new data archive from scratch; it combined the operators of two existing NSF facilities under one non-profit membership organization.
EarthScope Consortium now operates both:
- SAGE (Seismological Facility for the Advancement of Geoscience) — the seismological archive this page covers, formerly branded as IRIS Data Services.
- GAGE (Geodetic Facility for the Advancement of Geoscience) — the geodetic archive formerly operated by UNAVCO, covering GPS/GNSS, InSAR, and related crustal-deformation data.
For citation and provenance purposes, this history matters: data deposited or downloaded before 2023 may carry “IRIS” branding in metadata, DOIs, or acknowledgment language, while the same infrastructure today operates under the EarthScope Consortium name. Both “IRIS” and “IRIS/EarthScope” remain in common use in the literature and should not be treated as separate facilities.
What SAGE archives
SAGE is a domain repository purpose-built for one scientific community rather than a generalist archive: it holds seismological and closely related geophysical time-series data contributed by instruments and experiments worldwide, including:
- Ground-motion (seismic waveform) data from permanent and temporary seismic networks
- Infrasonic and atmospheric data
- Magnetotelluric data
- Strain and hydrological/hydroacoustic data from related geophysical sensor deployments
The archive spans data from hundreds of individual field experiments and permanent monitoring networks contributed by research groups, universities, and government agencies around the world, not just U.S.-funded projects — a scale and international scope typical of a mature, long-running domain repository rather than an institutional one.
The Data Management Center (DMC)
The technical archive and distribution system underlying SAGE is the Data Management Center (DMC), based near the University of Washington in Seattle. The DMC is the operational core that ingests incoming data from field networks, applies quality control, stores it long-term, and serves it back out to researchers on request — the same ingest → preserve → access pattern described generically in the data repository concept, but implemented here with domain-specific tooling built around seismology’s own file formats and query patterns.
Data formats and access standards
SAGE data is built around formats and access protocols that are themselves de facto standards across the international seismological community, not proprietary to EarthScope:
- SEED (Standard for the Exchange of Earthquake Data) — the archival container format for seismic waveform and metadata.
- miniSEED — the compact time-series subset of SEED used for the bulk of waveform delivery; data arriving in other formats is typically converted to SEED/miniSEED plus StationXML (station metadata) for archival.
- FDSN Web Services — the query/access protocol defined by the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN) and implemented across multiple national data centers, not just SAGE, which is what allows software (obspy, SeisComP, and similar tools) written against one FDSN-compliant archive to also query others.
Seismic networks archived through SAGE are also assigned FDSN network codes, a scheme that functions as a de facto persistent identifier for a network’s data holdings within the seismological community, serving a role broadly analogous to the persistent identifiers used elsewhere in research data management, even though its origin and governance are domain-specific rather than a general-purpose scheme like a DOI.
Trustworthiness and certification
The archive has held CoreTrustSeal certification as a trustworthy digital repository, the same certification framework referenced across the broader research-data-repository landscape (see CASRAI’s guide to choosing an open data repository for what that certification actually evaluates). For a research administrator vetting deposit or citation options, that certification is a useful independent signal alongside the facility’s decades-long operating history and continuous NSF funding.
Access model
Consistent with long-standing norms in observational seismology, the core waveform and station-metadata holdings are broadly accessible for research use without a paywall, queryable directly via FDSN/IRIS web services or through EarthScope’s web interfaces. Some EarthScope resources beyond the core data archive — certain applications, training materials, and community services — require a free account. Institutions and researchers relying on this facility as a named repository in a funder-mandated data management plan should confirm current access terms for their specific dataset type directly with EarthScope Consortium, since access conditions can vary by data type and network policy.
Why this matters for research data management
SAGE is a useful reference case for research administrators and data stewards for a few reasons beyond seismology itself:
- Domain repositories vs. generalist repositories. It illustrates what a mature, community-governed domain repository looks like in practice — discipline-specific formats, its own access protocol, and governance tied to the international research community it serves, in contrast to a generalist repository that accepts any file type.
- Naming continuity after a merger. The IRIS-to-EarthScope transition is a concrete example of why a data management plan naming a specific repository should be revisited periodically over a multi-year award: the underlying infrastructure and its NSF funding relationship persisted through the 2023 merger, but the organizational name researchers should cite and acknowledge changed.
- Long-term NSF-facility funding as a preservation signal. Continuous funding as a designated NSF facility, combined with independent CoreTrustSeal certification, is the kind of institutional durability evidence a DMP reviewer or repository-selection checklist should look for, and is directly relevant to the criteria discussed in CASRAI’s broader repository-selection guidance.
Frequently asked questions
Is IRIS still a valid name to use for this archive?
“IRIS” refers to Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, the organization that built and operated this archive until its January 2023 merger with UNAVCO formed EarthScope Consortium. The infrastructure, funding relationship with NSF, and much of the underlying web-service architecture carried over; the operating organization’s name did not. Both names remain in active use in the literature, and citing older datasets or documentation, “IRIS” is often still the accurate historical name to use.
Is SAGE the same thing as GAGE?
No. Both are NSF facilities operated by EarthScope Consortium, but SAGE covers seismological and related geophysical time-series data (the subject of this page), while GAGE covers geodetic data such as GPS/GNSS and InSAR, inherited from the former UNAVCO consortium.
Does SAGE assign DOIs to datasets?
Persistent identification in this domain is primarily handled through FDSN network codes rather than a generalist DOI-per-dataset model common to repositories like Dryad or Zenodo. Researchers should confirm current citation and identifier practice directly with EarthScope Consortium for a specific network or dataset before finalizing a data management plan or citation.
Who funds SAGE?
SAGE is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation as one of two NSF facilities (alongside GAGE) that EarthScope Consortium operates under a cooperative agreement.
This page describes the SAGE Facility as a reference example of domain-repository infrastructure for research data management purposes; for authoritative, current details on data access, formats, and citation practice, consult EarthScope Consortium directly.
