We would like to bring to your attention a very refreshing overview of the current status, challenges and paths forward related to ocean observing system integration and coordination, published in Frontiers in Marine Science in late January: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.737671/full.
Adèle Révelard and co-authors describe the current, rather suboptimal, situation touching on many fundamental drawbacks like excessive multiplication of overlapping efforts, confusion related to roles and responsibilities of entities involved in coordination, counter-productive effects of current academic excellence assessment system and more. They then point to several critical transformations needed in order for the ocean observing system to evolve into a societally useful, structurally flexible and innovative tool aligned with the spirit of the UN Ocean Decade.
We praise the authors for referring to and concluding from a large body of work on the topic published in the past decade or so, and recommend reading this article to everyone with stakes in ocean observing integration and coordination.