BODC operates on behalf of the Marine Science and Technology Board of the UK's Natural Environment Research Council and acts as the UK's focal point for international oceanographic data exchange. It participates within the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC)'s network of national oceanographic data centres (NODCs) and was a founding partner of the European Sea-Search network. BODC maintains a national oceanographic database, and provides a data service to research scientists, industry, and local and central government, and to major oceanographic programmes. In particular, it provides active data management support to NERC's Thematic Projects, including the AUTOSUB, LOIS and PRIME projects and the UK components of JGOFS and WOCE. It is the WOCE Data Assembly Centre for sea level data and, on behalf of the IOC and IHO Joint Guiding Committee for the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO), is responsible for developing the GEBCO Digital Atlas.

BODC also acts as the data centre for a number of EC/MAST projects including OMEX, INDIA and PROVESS. BODC exchanges data freely with other NODCs on a bilateral basis, but reserves the right to charge other users the marginal costs involved in making data available e.g. costs of copying, materials and postage. These charges may be waived for reasonable requests in support of bona-fide scientific research. Some data held by BODC are of restricted availability, awaiting final clearance by the scientists involved in their original collection.