ECN Data Centre Data Policy

1. Ownership

The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) holds Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) for all ECN data jointly with each participant, participants having equal IPR with NERC for their own sites’ data.  Data originators retain exclusive rights to ECN data collected at their own sites for applications outside the remit of ECN.

ECN has adopted the principles of the NERC data policy for long-term management and dissemination of data.
 

2. Data Access and Licensing

2.1 ECN Core Data

Data collected by the ECN Network are for the public good and will be made openly available for others to use.  ECN will supply data for free (unless there are specific third-party licensing arrangements in place or if a request is particularly complex).  The policy allows ECN researchers a period (a maximum of two years) to work on the data exclusively before data are made available to others.  Data are made available under licence. 

2.2 ECN Summary Data

ECN summary data are freely available, but subject to the conditions of use stated in the ECN licence agreement. These conditions are repeated on the relevant internet pages.  Users must pass through this page to progress with the database access system, and they accept the conditions by the act of pressing the 'Accept Conditions and access the Data' button. Users and use are logged by email and IP address.
 

3. Privacy and Cookies

3.1 Privacy

ECN does occasionally need to hold personal information about users – for example to administer data requests.  This will be clearly indicated on the web page when we need to do this.  This information will be held in the ECN Database, in accordance with the Data Protection Act, and will only be used for ECN purposes.  

3.2  Cookies

When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.

These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:

• enabling a service to recognise your device so you don't have to give the same information several times during one task
• recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don't need to do it for every web page requested
• measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there's enough capacity to ensure they are fast

You can manage these small files yourself and learn more about them through "Internet browser cookies - what they are and how to manage them" www.direct.gov.uk/managingcookies

The ECN Data Centre uses Google Analytics to measure website traffic and help improve the effectiveness of this website.  Google Analytics sets cookies to help us accurately estimate the number of visitors to the website and volumes of usage.  This allows us to ensure that the service is available when you want it and fast.  For further details on the cookies set by Google Analytics, please refer to the Google Code website.

The ECN Data Centre also uses cookies to temporarily store information on your computer to enable session state between Active Server Pages.  Session state is a way of remembering you between web pages and we use it, for example, to ensure that you only have to log in once when viewing protected areas of the website.  We do not collect any information about you except that required for system administration of the web server.  These cookies automatically expire when you exit your browser. 

References:

NERC (2011).  NERC Data Policy Statement:  http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/sites/data/policy2011.asp

V3, 15^th June 2011

Contact the ECN Data Centre at ecn@ceh.ac.uk |  Data Policy  |  Privacy and Cookies  
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