[LTER-im] LTER Data Access Policy Request for Comments

[Henshaw, Donald]

Corinna and all,
A group of Andrews LTER PIs and data managers gathered recently to discuss the data access policy for LTER data. We have decided that the Creative Commons license CC0 is appropriate for our use and will match the proposed EDI default license. While tracking of our data use and citation of our data is extremely important to us, we didn't feel that the CC-BY license would really create any differences in the number of citations of our data.  However, we have decided to strengthen the opening line of the intellectual rights statement proposed by EDI to something, as one PI described, more "guilt-inducing" such as "If you download this dataset you have an ethical obligation to cite it appropriately in any publication that results from its use."  Currently, the proposed line is: "It is considered professional conduct to appropriately cite the dataset if used in publications."

The Andrews provides an acknowledgement statement from our webpage for users downloading data for data use in publications. Word acknowledgements in publications have been far more common than a direct citation of data included in paper references and NSF has suggested that a formal acknowledgement is important. However, it is challenging to get users to acknowledge data use and we hope that EDI can have more discussions with NSF on this issue as we move to more open data availability. To help encourage and promote the use of data citations for use of Andrews LTER data, we are planning to provide the appropriate data citation, in both a highly visible manner and as a downloadable format, for the set being downloaded.


*              We encourage EDI to provide the specific citation as part of the downloadable data package

*              Will a citation including DOI be stored in EML?

*              The current citation example listed in the LTER Data Access Policy should be revised, for example, to match what PASTA currently displays as the citation

We have been tracking data downloads for each data set from our webpage for over 15 years and have included this information in LTER and USFS PNW annual reports and NSF proposals. While we have heard little feedback from NSF regarding their perspective on this, we feel this is valuable information. To better account for downloads of Andrews data we hope to also track downloads from PASTA and DataONE. We are concerned that the download counts from PASTA include web robot counts along with the genuine downloads.


*              We encourage EDI to devise a way to filter bot requests from download reports

Finally with regard to data access requirements, while the EDI requires no registration information from data users, the Andrews will continue (at least for now) to capture the user IP address and request email address, general affiliation from a dropdown list (Andrews LTER, academic, international, education, government, etc.), and proposed use from a dropdown (general, academic, student, educator, etc.) from those downloading data.  Capturing this information was originally added to satisfy the data access requirements listed in the LTER Data Access Policy. As the LTER data access policy is revised or rewritten we may change what we do in this regard.

Thanks for engaging everyone into this needed discussion.
Andrews LTER


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