ESRF Data Policy

The ESRF Council endorsed the implementation of a Data Policy for data taken at the ESRF beamlines at the end of 2015. The Data Policy is based on the PaNdata Data Policy which was a deliverable of the European FP7 project PaN-data Europe delivered in 2011. The Data Policy defines the ESRF as the custodian of raw data and metadata. This means the ESRF will provide users with automatically collected metadata for all experiments carried out on its beamlines, including the beamlines from Collaborating Research Groups. The metadata will be stored in the ICAT metadata catalogue which can be accessed online to browse and download (meta)data. The experimental team will have sole access to the data during a three-year embargo period, renewable if necessary. After the embargo, the data will be released under a CC-BY-4 licence with open access to anyone who has registered with the ESRF data portal. Data generated no beamlines implementing the data policy automatically have a DOI created for them so they can be cited in publications.

The ESRF data policy comes very timely as the scientific landscape in Europe and worldwide changes. Recently the Springer group announced that all their journals (which include Nature and related publications) will require data in publications be covered by a data policy. The ESRF data policy will enable users to publish results derived from data taken at the ESRF without further action on their part other than referring to the ESRF data policy.

When applying for beam time it is necessary to accept the Data Policy. Accepting the policy does not mean that all beamlines are yet able to implement the policy.

Implementation

Implementing the policy involves a number of steps and these take time to implement. The deadline for implementing the data policy on all ESRF beamlines is in 2020 at the restart after the big shutdown to install and commission the EBS. In order to keep users informed of progress of the implementation of the data policy the following table summarises the state of the implementation on the different beamlines. If a beamline does not appear in this list then it does not implement the data policy yet.

Any questions concerning the Data Policy or its implementation can be addressed to datapolicy@esrf.fr.

*Techniques covered - lists which techniques are currently concerned by the Data Policy
*Metadata collection - status of metadata collection and storage in metadata catalogue for the listed techniques (orange = planned / in progress, green = implemented, grey = not planned / implemented yet)
*Data archiving - status of long term archiving in tape library (green = data are being archived for 10 years in tape archive)
*Open access of data - indicates if data is open access (green) or still under embargo (red), or no data archived (grey)