Code of Conduct – vegetation and soil data
BioResilience: Access to plot data, collaboration, and authorship
The BioResilience project defines under the following guidelines data access, authorship, and scientific collaboration:
General
- BioResilience’s tree census data will be shared through ForestPlots.NET. Rights to access data for new plots established under BioResilience’s budget and coordination will be provided only by BioResiliences’ principal investigators and postdocs. BioResilience encourages open access on first publication. In all cases, including open access, we will still request that the original investigators (those specified in the ForestPlots.NET platform) are directly invited to co-authorship and scientific collaboration. This should be done in the early stages of manuscript preparation. Open access will promote future collaborations, it will give visibility to the research teams, and it will enhance global knowledge on forest ecology.
- Collaborators who choose to submit data to ForestPlots.NET also agree to the ForestPlots.NET agreement (https://www.forestplots.net/en/join-forestplots/code-of-conduct).
- Amongst partners in BioResilience, data sharing does not imply transfer of rights to use data, including authorship and future collaborations. Explicit agreement from the original researchers will need to be obtained before submitting work for publication.
- A co-author is defined as someone who shares plot data or participates actively in the analyses and writing of scientific manuscripts. Participation by providing suggestions or ideas for the project’s development does not imply co-authorship but will be acknowledged.
- BioResilience will share the right to access data for the recensus of forest plots made under the Bioresilience project’s budget, field team and coordination only with the researchers that established those plots.
- Where BioResilience conducts a recensus in a given plot using BioResilience staff and/or budget, we will request that collaborators who established the plot originally make the prior census data available for that plot in order to make use of the time series as this is critical for the science of the BioResilience project.
- Data sharing can be done only after quality control has been performed. Data quality control should be achieved within 24 months after the data were collected, and it will include corrections in data codes and taxonomic names, among others. This will be the responsibility of field teams, PIs and coordinators.
- We encourage the use of data for undergraduate, Masters or PhD projects, as well as in local research, given previous consent of PIs, field leaders and coordinators.
Data sharing for any DNA barcoding data
- The guidelines above apply to data sharing and co-authorship for DNA barcode sequence data. Any new DNA barcode sequence data generated directly via the BioResilience project will be made publicly available via GenBank on first publication of the data.
To request use of BioResilience data, please agree to the data Code of Conduct using the Data Request Form.
