MOTIVATIONIn these days, research is conducted in a highly computer-aided manner, and it has become more and more challenging to select, annotate, store, and publish the data generated in order to enable other people to find and reuse them for further research (Science Staff, 2011). Besides the technical aspects, scientific quality is a very important factor for determining the scientific value of the data. An example of this kind of research is the field of meteorology, where vast amounts of data are produced in observations and simulations. These data have to be stored and published in a way such that they can be uniquely cited in publications and easily retrieved.Technically speaking, persistent identifiers are already in place, e.g., those of the Handle system or Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). These identifiers consist of a unique, immutable resource name and a landing page that contains or references the actual content. Both are registered in a central and publicly available directory. If the data move to another site, the landing page value can easily be changed to the new location. Persistent identifiers have been used for scientific articles for some time now and have become increasingly popular for citing research data as well (Paskin, 2005 ;Brase, 2004). Just to mention an example, the citation reference to data which have been assigned the DOI "10.1594/WDCC/dphase_mpeps" looks as follows: The Internet address has been set up on the basis of the DOI, and it enables the reader to directly interpret the DOI and to be directed to the current landing page.Since the availability of research data is an important factor for reuse, the data usually have to enter a long-term archive as a prerequisite for being attributed a persistent identifier. In addition to this logistical requirement, the data themselves have to be prepared for being cited and used by other researchers and thus have to be of high scientific Data Science Journal, Volume 11, 9 November 2012 89 and technical quality (Hense & Quadt, 2011). The process to ensure these quality aspects differs from one institute to the next and is hardly systematised and automated.From April 2009 to March 2012, three complementary institutions conducted the joint research project "Publication of Environmental Data" (http://umwelt.wikidora.com). The project was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), with the aim of developing a well-defined scientific data publication process (based on research data that had already been stored in a long-term archive); the project was also aimed at developing a software solution that supports and automates this process. The following roles were represented: meteorologists as subject matter experts for the publication of data from observational experiments,  experts for the management of (meta)data and the data publication and DOI registration procedure, and  business process analysts and software developers.In the following, the approaches to and achievements of the research project will be presented in det...

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