Data Sharing and Copyright Policies
Data generated and/or collated through iBMS will be made freely available for scientific analysis and publications, and for conservation-related policy documents, following the guidelines mentioned below. To serve people with diverse goals and motivations, iBMS implements a three-tier data copyright system in which contributors can opt from: (a) creative commons, non-commercial copyright (CC-BY-NC), (b) embargoed contributions (3-yr or 5-yr embargoes, depending on the timeline in which contributors hope to publish their results, after which the data will move to CC-BY-NC license), and (c) individually copyrighted data (©). Masters and PhD students, post-docs and young professionals may find the embargoed option particularly attractive.
Data generated under the copyright options (a) and (b) will, in due course, be made available freely to all potential users under a CC-BY-NC license on data deposition platforms such as GBIF and Dryad. We agree that all scientific data should be readily and openly available to any parties interested in scientific research and conservation policy. Therefore, we encourage those who share data under the copyright option (c) to eventually make their data available under a CC-BY-NC license so that their datasets may be used more widely in scientific papers and butterfly conservation assessments. However, it should be understood that the decision to make the data available under a certain copyright option is entirely with the people who generate data, and their decisions should be respected.
More detailed data sharing and copyright policies may be made available on this page in consultation with data contributors as more datasets are contributed, and scientific papers and reports are released, in due course. Please contact the coordinators of IBMS if you have further suggestions.