Data Management Policy

General description of data

The data management policies and plans are different for the operational and development aspects of NeIC. The Nordic Tier-1 data management policies pertaining to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data stored at the Nordic Tier-1 are defined by CERN and the individual LHC experiments. The current versions of relevant documents are:

ALICE data preservation strategy, DOI: 10.7483/OPENDATA.ALICE.54NE.X2EA

ATLAS Data Access Policy, DOI: 10.7483/OPENDATA.ATLAS.T9YR.Y7MZ

ATLAS Data Preservation Policy, ATL-CB-PUB-2015-002, CERN, April 2015, https://cds.cern.ch/record/2012333

WLCG MoU, https://wlcg.web.cern.ch/mou

For the development projects, NeIC does not participate directly in the research using the e-infrastructure. It is the responsibility of the researchers conducting the work to manage their data appropriately in accordance with all current and future data management requirements stipulated in rules and regulations or which are expected in the respective research domain. NeIC supports the efforts of the research projects to conform to the policies and standards that are extant during the development process

Agreements on rights of use and licenses

The Collaboration Agreement signed by all project partners regulates the reciprocal rights and obligations of the partners taking part in the NeIC projects. The Collaboration Agreement states that

Project outcomes, including reports and software, will be made openly available to the public. Intellectual property rights of the project results shall be owned by the party, or party’s employees as applicable, or parties carrying out the work generating that result. Attribution is done according to applicable branding policies. Unless otherwise agreed in writing, any equipment purchased for the purposes of the project will remain the property of the partner making the purchase.

and

Intellectual property rights on documentation, software, models, data – anything a partner brings to the collaboration – remain with that partner.

NeIC projects and communities are free to choose licenses that are aligned with their communities’ practices. NeIC’s openness policy provides a guideline. The vast majority of outputs published in Zenodo have a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Opening or sharing data

NeIC will strive to publish its outputs as widely as possible, including open source software, public reports and other information associated with the progress of the project. NeIC principles on openness are in the policy at https://wiki.neic.no/wiki/Openness_policy and NeIC documents should be easily findable, readable, and referable.

The openness policy also states that data generated in NeIC projects and activities should generally be openly available. There is a NeIC community in the open access repository Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/communities/neic/ and includes a policy and instructions for depositing NeIC outputs, such as reports, papers, and data sets.

Documentation & metadata

NeIC does not provide general guidance for data documentation and metadata. However, the vast majority of NeIC projects adhere to community guidelines for data documentation and metadata, and are also contributing to the development of community guidelines.

Outputs from NeIC projects and activities published in Zenodo get DOIs. The basic metadata production requirements of Zenodo are adhered to. The outputs published in Zenodo can be connected to NeIC’s GitHub resources, such as generated code and software.

Storage, backup & access control to data

The data management policies and plans are different for the operational and development aspects of NeIC. The Nordic Tier-1 data management policies pertaining to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data stored at the Nordic Tier-1 are defined by CERN and the individual LHC experiments. NeIC does not participate directly in research using the e-infrastructure for development projects. It is the responsibility of the researchers conducting the work to manage their data appropriately. NeIC supports the efforts of the projects to comply with the policies and standards during the development process.

The NeIC development efforts are engaged in developing services, tools and infrastructure to enable research within and across borders, but is not set up or funded to provide such resources to the member states (the exception is the Nordic Tier 1 as mentioned). Therefore, national or institutional resources are needed to provide such resources to the researchers generating data or output that require non-negligible amount of resources.

NeIC as a rule does not provide services (for sensitive data or otherwise), it develops them for deployment in the member states or across a geographic region. Access to data is handled on a national level, typically employing federated authentication and authorisation services such as Feide, Kalmar, Haka. Project output is largely handled through the use of Zenodo for output publications. What is stated for the services and access to data above applies to long-term preservation of data as well.