Data Policy (excerpted from the BEST-BSIERP Program Management Plan)

NPRB and NSF require data sharing in their respective agreements with principal investigators. Principal investigators will submit all data to their respective data managers (NPRB or NSF) as soon as practical but within one year of collection unless the respective program managers grant special permission regarding time or content (e.g., human subject protocols indicate otherwise) or extensive post-collection processing (e.g., zooplankton identification, laboratory analyses).

Consideration also will be made to adjust time requirements in submitting data as part of a graduate student program with respective program manager approval.

These data may be shared among principal investigators in the BEST-BSIERP program, so long as individual and community intellectual property rights are protected. Principal investigators will strive to assign important preliminary data, which may be of great interest to other researchers, a high priority for availability. Intellectual ownership and authorship will be protected under any data sharing protocol. For the first two-year period following data collection and post-collection processing, data usage and authorship are fully protected. Following this two-year period, permission and the right of authorship should be fully recognized until the end of the program.

Data managers will communicate with field researchers about their needs in terms of common standards, units and formats, and will endeavor to keep metadata requirements simple and provide templates where possible. Data managers will facilitate development of a unified data table with common units and formats. Data Managers will publish metadata on public web pages to facilitate collaboration with scientists outside BEST/BSIERP.

BEST-BSIERP Program Management Plan