Data Policy

This document sets the rules (policy) for accessing all data stored by users in the LifeWatch Italy data portal. The policy aims at ensuring the diffusion of biodiversity data, giving them as much visibility as possible within the scientific community.

LifeWatch Italy provides data storage facilities for any kind of biodiversity dataset (e.g. ecological data, species occurrence, etc.). The intellectual property of the data submitted by an individual data provider to the LifeWatch Italy data portal remains exclusively with the individual data providers. Individual data providers are the only responsible for any copyright infringement, as well as for the breach of other proprietary right of any person or entity.
Terms definition:

  1. Data provider is an entity (any person, institution or legal entity) that submits and shares a dataset through the LifeWatch Italy data portal.
  2. Dataset is a collection of original biodiversity data collected by a data provider, or a collection of biodiversity data from other external sources. In the latter case, data providers are required to fully acknowledge the original external sources in the metadata.
  3. User is any person, institution or legal entity, that requests the use of LifeWatch Italy facilities and/or any dataset stored in the LifeWatch Italy data portal.

LifeWatch Italy data use policy

LifeWatch Italy provides users with free of charge access to the data and metadata, free registration is required in order to access the LifeWatch Italy data portal.

Metadata and data access, as well as their usage, could be subject to different levels of restriction:

  1. Metadata are always freely accessible, without any restriction through the LifeWatch Italy data portal; data access and usage is guaranteed under an open license agreement (Creative Commons);
  2. LifeWatch Italy default data usage license agreement for all uploaded datasets is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (“CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International“) license*;
  3. Individual data providers also have the option to define their own data usage policy, indicating the restriction level for data usage. Restriction levels will be negotiated between data providers and LifeWatch Italy, but they must be anyway consistent with the principles of the LifeWatch Italy Data Policy, and with what specified at the following points 4 and 5;
  4. Upon request of data providers, access to data may be subject to an embargo period (maximum of one year). Only under particular conditions, data providers may request a longer embargo period. During the embargo period, only metadata will be fully available;
  5. Sensible data (e.g. occurrence of endangered species) may be subject to additional restrictions that will be negotiated between individual data providers and LifeWatch Italy.

* This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

The LifeWatch Italy Data Policy is also available in pdf.