Data Policy for Marine Data Sharing in Italy

The RITMARE Flagship Project, funded by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research, integrates national marine research of the whole Italian marine research community. To overcome barriers to data access, the RITMARE project issued a data policy - an agreement on how to share the data and products (see full document in Italian here http://figshare.com/articles/RITMARE_Data_Policy_document/1235546).
Below are the highlights of the RITMARE RDP:

1. The rules apply to both the RITMARE community and to the external users.


2. The generator (and the owner if other than the generator) must be named in all cases.


3. Anyone interested in publishing the data within the first two years from data creation, should verify if the data generator wants to participate as co-author.


4. A moratorium of 6, 12, or 18 months can be set for data generators to have primary publication rights.


5. Ancillary information (e.g., calibration files and instrument specifications) must be supplied with raw data regardless of the parameter values that data collection aimed at.


6. Licences apply to all background data and products.


7. At the end of the moratorium a licence automatically connects to the foreground data and products.

Source: Anna Basoni, Stefano Menegon and Alessandro Sarretta (2015), Sailing towards Open Marine Data: the RItMARE Data Policy. ERCIM NEWS, N 100, http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/images/stories/EN100/EN100-web.pdf