Database

Data Acess Policy

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DATA ACCESS POLICY: GLOBAL PALAEOFIRE WORKING GROUP

June 2007 - Present

The following data access policy is designed to cover both observational data and modeling results.

The data held in the data base is used by the Palaeofire Working Group for specified analyses (i.e., the Dartington Hall papers).
People contributing charcoal data to the database are co-authors of the paper in which the specified analysis is published.
The data underlying the analyses and the results of the analysis are considered public-access once the initial paper describing the database and the specified analyses is "in press".
The database is made available to all project members throughout the project via the project website. Although this is primarily designed to facilitate checking and verification of the database, it would be possible to use the data for other analyses as the need or opportunity for this arises. People who wish to use the data for such analyses must contact the working group coordinators, who will then seek permission for access from the relevant members of the working group.
Members of the project may request access to data in the database for their own analyses during the course of the project through the coordinator of the synthesis.
On publication, the most current version of the database is lodged with the archive facilities at NOAA-NGDC WDC-A (Palaeoclimatology) and at BADC in the UK, and is therefore freely available to the scientific community. Appropriate synthetic products from the database and paper will also be lodged with the Palaeoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project.
The database may be used for further analyses after the publication of the initial paper. Co-authorship of subsequent analyses of the data from the database is determined by intellectual input to these analyses, not contribution of data. To facilitate collaboration, the coordinator of each synthesis will announce planned analyses on the project website.

The data-access policy is based on the policy adopted by the Palaeovegetation Mapping Project (BIOME 6000). It conforms to the guidelines laid down in the PAGES data guide Other initiatives within the BIOME 6000 project (e.g. PAIN, CiMBIO) and in QUEST have similar data-access policies, and these policies are in conformity with the guidelines given by WDC-A, IGBP-PAGES, and funding agencies such as the EU and the UK NERC, and is consistent with the public-access policy of journals such as Nature.