1. Ownership
The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) holds Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) for all ECN data jointly with each participant, participants having equal IPR with NERC for their own sites' data. Data originators retain exclusive rights to ECN data collected at their own sites for applications outside the remit of ECN.
ECN has adopted the principles of the NERC data policy for long-term management and dissemination of data.
2. Data Access and Licensing
2.1 ECN Core Data
Data collected by the ECN Network are for the public good and will be made openly available for others to use. ECN will supply data for free (unless there are specific third-party licensing arrangements in place or if a request is particularly complex). The policy allows ECN researchers a period (a maximum of two years) to work on the data exclusively before data are made available to others. Data are made available as published datasets on the CEH Environmental Information Platform, under an Open Government Licence.
2.2 ECN Summary Data
[Note: this section is currently not applicable, as we are not currently providing access to summary data]
ECN summary data are freely available on this website, but subject to the conditions of use stated on the relevant internet pages. Users must accept these conditions, by pressing the 'Accept Conditions and access the Data' button, in order to pass through this page and progress with the data access interface. Users and use are logged in the ECN database by email and IP address.
Reference:
NERC Data Policy Statement: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20220204140222/https://nerc.ukri.org:443/research/sites/environmental-data-service-eds/policy/
Last updated: 01 June 2023