General Data Exchange Policy
It is a prerequisite for the success of BALTEX to have an open approach to the exchange of all relevant information concerning the project. In particular, all data obtained from field experiments and process studies, as well as the codes and algorithms developed during BALTEX and the results of numerical experiments, should be available as freely as possible for non-commercial research purposes within the BALTEX scientific community.
The storage of observational data as well as information about distributed data archives will be administered by appointed BALTEX Data Centers for meteorology, hydrology and oceanography. Their responsibility is the timely archiving and minimum-cost distribution of the information concerned. Whenever appropriate, data should be exchanged in real-time via existing networks.
Priority rights of individual scientists should be properly respected. At the very least, appropriate reference to the source of data or information must be made. It is, however, strongly encouraged that the receiving scientist or group should co-operate with the originating scientist, leading e.g. to the joint publication of results.
Data support from the national meteorological, hydrological and oceanographical services is of the greatest importance for a successful outcome of the BALTEX programme. The commercial rights of the involved agencies must be protected. In this context, a formal commitment of the Data Centers and the participating scientists in terms of the exclusively scientific utilization of data and results may be necessary.
It is recommended that such a commitment should meet the following guidelines:
- The data will be used only for research within the BALTEX scientific programme.
- The data will not be passed on to a third party without permission from the data supplier.
- The data will not be used for any commercial purposes.
- The data supplier will be kept informed about scientific findings which are based on the delivered data.
- Proper acknowledgement of the data source will be given in all publications based on the data.
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