Wind energy is abundantly available both onshore and offshore. As a response to the present climate crisis focus on wind energy is increasing due to its renewable and environmentally friendly characteristics. Due to social and political reasons the trend has been shifted largely from onshore to offshore wind farms. Offshore wind energy production faces a wide range of new challenges in design, development, manufacturing, installation, and maintenance and operation. The need, objectives, method, benefits, and application of a proposed reliability and maintainability database are identified in this paper. In the offshore oil and gas industry the OREDA concept for data collection has been running for more than 25 years. Therefore it will be briefly described what is considered to be the state of the art in this industry when it comes to data collection. Potential challenges and issues pertaining to the reliability and maintainability data collection of offshore wind turbines are outlined and categorized. The architecture of the proposed database is illustrated. The main building blocks of the database are briefly described and their possible effects on the reliability and maintainability of offshore wind turbines are highlighted. It is expected that the realization of the proposed database will open a new vista of knowledge in understanding the real behavior of offshore wind turbines in the marine environment. Another expectation is the benefits it will bring to the technological areas ranging from design to operation. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.