Q. PRISM Data Policies

Submission Policy

1. Any University of Calgary scholar, student or staff member may deposit items.
2. All datasets must include metadata.
3. The administrator will verify depositors’ University of Calgary affiliation and that the deposit can be considered research data.
4. The ownership, validity, and authenticity of the content of deposit is the sole responsibility of the depositor.
5. Any copyright/licensing violations are entirely the responsibility of the depositor.
6. If human subjects were studied in the collection of these materials, the data were collected with approval from and in compliance with the appropriate research ethics board's policies and procedures, and the distribution of this material is in compliance with these policies and procedures. See the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans 2nd Edition, and the Tri-Agency Framework: Responsible Conduct of Research for guidance on aspects of consent, privacy, confidentiality, indigenous people’s rights, secondary use of data, and data linkage.
7. If the deposit contains material for which you do not hold copyright, you have obtained the unrestricted permission of the copyright owner to grant the University of Calgary and Scholars Portal the rights required by this license, and such third-party owned material is clearly identified and acknowledged within the text or content of the submission
8. The deposit does not contain software viruses or any other computer codes, files, or programs that are designed or intended to disrupt, damage, limit or interfere with the proper function of any software, hardware, or telecommunications equipment or to damage or obtain unauthorized access to any system, data or other information of the University of Calgary, Scholars Portal or any third party
9. If PRISM Data administrators receive evidence of copyright violation, non-compliance with ethics agreements, or sharing of proprietary or confidential data the relevant item will be deaccessioned or removed immediately. 

Content Policy

1. PRISM Data is intended for sharing data and making that data accessible to the general public. Consequently, before uploading, data should be appropriately anonymized in accordance with ethics agreements and to maintain privacy and confidentiality.
2. For data where limited access is necessary, PRISM Data offers several options:
   • Custom terms of use that can be used to require those downloading the dataset to agree to specific terms of their use of the data.  If not specified Creative Commons Zero (CC0) terms are provided by default (i.e., public domain dedicated that reserves no rights).
   • It is possible to require access requests for individual files or for entire datasets.  When this is enabled (under dataset terms) those wanting to access the data will have to submit requests for access; these requests will notify and be mediated by the dataset owner.
   • Guest books can be enabled to impose an information form to be filled out before data is downloaded.  Information fields can include name, email, institution, position, and other user-specified questions.  Contact research.data@libanswers.ucalgary.com for assistance in enabling this functionality.
3. While PRISM Data may automatically translate file formats (e.g., tabular data will be automatically translated to other formats such as CSV, TSV, and RData), the underlying data remains as deposited.
4. Libraries and cultural resources will apply accepted preservation strategies to all content.

Libraries and Cultural Resources retains the right to:

1. Redistribute or amend metadata for items in the repository.
2. Refuse or de-accession datasets under certain circumstances - see the Withdrawal Policy below.
3. Migrate items if the format is in danger of obsolescence.
4. Set quotas (size of files, the number of items) to determine what constitutes free service and after which point to charge a fee.
5. Charge fees for activities requiring extensive centralized support from Libraries and Cultural Resources (e.g. large amount of de-accessioning or batch-loading).

Preservation Policy

1. Items will be retained indefinitely.
2. PRISM Data administrators cannot ensure continued readability and accessibility for all file formats. It is recommended practice to utilize open and non-proprietary file formats for sharing and use within data repositories.   E.g., CSV, TXT, XML, RTF.
3. Items are not normally removed from PRISM Data.
4. Items are allocated a checksum to facilitate the detection of alterations.

Withdrawal Policy

Our practice is not to remove items from PRISM Data unless there are concerns regarding violation of the submission policy listed above.  PRISM Data administrators will investigate these matters and make a decision about withdrawal.

1. Withdrawn items are not deleted from PRISM Data, but are removed from public view.
2. The identifiers or URLs of any withdrawn items are retained indefinitely.
3. URLs will continue to point to 'tombstone' citations.
4. The metadata of withdrawn items will not be searchable.

Exceptions may apply.

Metadata Policy

1. Anyone may access the metadata free of charge.
2. The metadata may be re-used in any medium without prior permission, provided the DOI or link to the original metadata record is given.

Communities

If you wish to group your data submissions into a common listing by author, department, faculty, research group, or other organization within PRISM Data please contact research.data@libanswers.ucalgary.com.

These groupings, which we will call communities, are referred to as dataverses within PRISM Data.  With a community, you will have the ability to:

1. Decide policy regarding content to be submitted (within the Content Policy described above).
2. Decide who may submit content within your community.
3. Approve addition of subsequent sub-communities (sub-dataverses).
4. Observe University policies relevant to PRISM Data.

More Information

For more information about or clarification of any of these policies, please contact research.data@libanswers.ucalgary.com.