Understanding marine transport and the dispersion of tracers is crucial for an effective strategy for protecting marine biodiversity and mitigating anthropogenic hazards. Single standalone observational sites are not effective for a long-term and large-scale strategy unless they are integrated into a network. Here we present the Italian coastal radar network that has been designed and implemented within the flagship project RITMARE. The network nodes are both HF and X-band radars, covering wide areas with different spatial and temporal resolutions. The network has the potential to provide real-time information of the velocity of surface currents and wave parameters. The data sharing IT framework is under development, aimed to the design and standardization of data format definitions, Quality Assessment and Quality Control (QA/QC) strategies, data management and dissemination policies. Data access tools are compliant to Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards and to INSPIRE and Climate and Forecast (CF) conventions. The use of netCDF format allows an easy implementation of all the open source services developed by UNIDATA.