D4Science Gateway Terms of Use

D4Science Gateway

This D4Science Gateway is an access point to D4Science.org products and services.

Upon registration, you can immediately use the storage space via the Workspace Service, the Email Service to send/receive data to other registered users, the Product Catalogue to browse available datasets, methods, and services therein published, the Social Service to share and read news and posts with your connections and the Notification Service for user notifications. You can also apply to a moderated or public Virtual Research Environment.

You own the information you provide to the D4Science.org Infrastructure under this Agreement, and may request its deletion at any time, unless you have shared information or content with others and they have not deleted it, or it was copied or stored by other users. Additionally, you grant D4Science.org Infrastructure a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royalty-free right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, process, analyze, and use in any way now known or in the future discovered, any information you explicitly share, directly or indirectly to D4Science.org Infrastructure, including, but not limited to, any user generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques or data to the services without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties. Any information you submit to us is at your own risk of loss as noted in the following sections of this Agreement.

By sharing information to us, you represent and warrant that you are entitled to share the information and that the information is accurate, not confidential, and not in violation of any contractual restrictions or other third party rights.

You must promptly notify the D4Science.org Infrastructure of any breach of security related to the Services, including but not limited to unauthorized use of your password or account. To help ensure the security of your password or account, please sign out from your account at the end of each session.

The D4Science.org Infrastructure may terminate your account in accordance with the terms of service if you fail to login to your account for a period of SIX months. Moreover, if you are found to be in violation of our policies at any time, as determined by the D4Science.org Infrastructure in its sole discretion, we may warn you or suspend or terminate your account.

Workspace Service

By accessing the Workspace service you shall be deemed to accept these conditions of use:

o   You may use the Workspace to store, retrieve, query, serve, and execute content that is owned, licensed or lawfully obtained by you.

o  You can post content to the Workspace only if (a) you created and own the rights to the content or you have the owner’s express permission to post the content; and (b) the content does not infringe any other person’s or entity’s rights (including the copyrights, trademarks, or privacy rights) or violate any applicable laws, this Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, our Community Best Practices, or any other posted policies.

o   The ownership of any intellectual property rights is not in anyway transferred to the D4Science.org Infrastructure.

o   In the case you decide to share it with other Users, you remain responsible for any misusage of the data by other Users.

o  At any time you can decide to unregister your data. All requests are immediately accepted and operated by the D4Science.org Infrastructure.

o   The D4Science.org Infrastructure can reproduce, modify, and generate derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes required by the management capabilities of the D4Science.org Infrastructure).

o   The D4Science.org Infrastructure will not otherwise move or distribute your data for any purpose, except when required to do so by law.

o   The D4Science.org Infrastructure is not responsible of the data uploaded and hosted by the infrastructure.

o  The D4Science.org Infrastructure will not be responsible of any issue regulating intellectual property rights infringement or illegal use of user's data.

o   The D4Science.org Infrastructure will make reasonable efforts to insure that data are persisted. In the event of hardware or software Failures caused by failures to a hard drive or power supply, the D4Science.org Infrastructure will make reasonable attempts to restore your data. No guarantee whatsoever is provided on the success of any user's data recovery.

o   If the D4Science.org Infrastructure reasonably believes any of the Content violates the law, infringes or misappropriates the rights of any third party, you will be notified and may request that such content be removed from the Workspace or access to it be disabled. If you do not remove or disable access to the Prohibited Content within ONE business day of our notice, the D4Science.org infrastructure manager may remove or disable access to the Prohibited Content or suspend its access.

o   You can use the data other users share with you in any circumstance and for all usage, reproduce the data, modify the data, and make derivative data based upon the original data, communicate to the public, including the right to reproduce or display the data or copies thereof to the public and perform publicly, as the case may be, the data.

o   You cannot in any circumstance and for any usage redistribute the data other users share with you or copies thereof, lend and rent those data or copies thereof, sub-license rights in the data or copies thereof.

Email Service

The D4Science.org Gateway implements an Email Service, in order to enable messages exchange only between D4Science.org registered users.

Your use of the D4Science.org Email Service is subject to the policies reported below. In addition to any other violations described in these terms of use, you may not:

o  Generate or facilitate unsolicited commercial emails.

o Sending unsolicited emails to significant numbers of email addresses belonging to individuals and/or entities with whom you have no preexisting relationship.

o   Send, upload, distribute or disseminate or offer to do the same with respect to any unlawful, defamatory, harassing, abusive, fraudulent, infringing, obscene, or otherwise objectionable content.

o   Transmit content that may be harmful to minors.

o  Illegally transmit another's intellectual property or other proprietary information without such owner's or licensor's permission.

o   Promote or encourage illegal activity.

o   Use the Email Service in connection with illegal peer-to-peer file sharing.

Product Catalogue

By accessing the Product Catalogue you shall be deemed to accept these conditions of use:

o  You may use the Product Catalogue to publish content that is owned, licensed or lawfully obtained by you.

o   You can publish content to the Product Catalogue only if (a) you created and own the rights to the content or you have the owner’s express permission to post the content; and (b) the content does not infringe any other person’s or entity’s rights (including the copyrights, trademarks, or privacy rights) or violate any applicable laws, this Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, our Community Best Practices, or any other posted policies.

o   At time of publication of content to the Product Catalogue you set the License associated to that content that will be shown at any access of the content.

o   The ownership of any intellectual property rights is not in anyway transferred to the D4Science.org Infrastructure.

o   At any time you can decide to unpublish your content. All requests are immediately accepted and operated by the D4Science.org Infrastructure.

o   The D4Science.org Infrastructure can reproduce, modify, and generate derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes required by the management capabilities of the D4Science.org Infrastructure).

o  The D4Science.org Infrastructure will not otherwise move or distribute your content for any purpose, except when required to do so by law.

o   The D4Science.org Infrastructure is not responsible of the published content hosted by the Product Catalogue.

o  The D4Science.org Infrastructure will not be responsible of any issue regulating intellectual property rights infringement, license infringement, or illegal use of user's data.

o   The D4Science.org Infrastructure will make reasonable efforts to insure that the content is persisted. In the event of hardware or software Failures caused by failures to a hard drive or power supply, the D4Science.org Infrastructure will make reasonable attempts to restore your content. No guarantee whatsoever is provided on the success of any user's content recovery.

o   If the D4Science.org Infrastructure reasonably believes any of the Content violates the law, infringes or misappropriates the rights of any third party, you will be notified and may request that such content be removed from the Product Catalogue or access to it be disabled. If you do not remove or disable access to the Prohibited Content within ONE business day of our notice, the D4Science.org infrastructure manager may remove or disable access to the Prohibited Content or suspend its access.

o   You can use the content other users published in any circumstance and for all usage, reproduce the data, modify the content, and make derivative data based upon the original content, communicate to the public, including the right to reproduce or display the content or copies thereof to the public and perform publicly, as the case may be, the content if and only if the license associated to the Content includes those rights.

o  You cannot in any circumstance and for any usage redistribute the content other users published or copies thereof, lend and rent those content or copies thereof, sub-license rights in the content or copies thereof.

Social Service

The D4Science.org Gateway offers a way to share information by allowing users to post updates, including links to news articles and new derivative datasets, and to comment on content published by some of the D4Science.org Applications or Users.

By exploiting the Social Service you shall be deemed to accept these conditions of use:

o   The sharing process can be done only within the members of a single Virtual Research Environment.

o   Ideas you post and information you share may be seen and used by other Users and D4Science.org cannot guarantee that other Users will not use the ideas and information that you share. Therefore, if you have an idea or information that you would like to keep confidential and/or don’t want others to use, or that is subject to third party rights that may be infringed by your sharing it, do not post it to the D4Science.org Gateway.

o   D4Science.org Infrastructure is not responsible for a user’s misuse or misappropriation of any content of information you post on the D4Science.org Gateway Social Service.

o  D4Science.org Infrastructure is not responsible on the updates/comments that Users can post on the Social Service.

o   In the case you remove any updates/comments, the D4Science.org Infrastructure cannot guarantee that other Users have copy of the removed content.

Notification Service

For the purpose of facilitating the user interaction with the D4Science.org Gateway Social Service and Email Service, a Notification Service is also present. The Notification Service can be configured from D4Science.org Gateway to an email address associated with your account.

By exploiting the Notification Service you shall be deemed to accept these conditions of use:

o   You agree that the D4Science.org Gateway may communicate with you by mail.

o   You can review the Notifications settings to enable/disable the email messages notifications.

o   You acknowledge and agree that D4Science.org shall have no liability associated with or arising from your failure to do so maintain accurate contact or other information, including, but not limited to, your failure to receive important notifications.

Virtual Research Environments (VREs)

In D4Science.org, services and related access to data are available through Virtual Research Environments (VREs). These VREs can take various forms including web interactive user interface, web applications, pluggable standalone user interface.

VREs can be created for a specific period and a specific task and only authorized users access data and services exposed through these VREs.

There are different levels of user authorization available: VRE Manager, VRE Designer, VRE Data Manager and VRE User:

o   VRE Designers select the services/data that are made available in the VRE;

o   VRE Managers have the right to grant access to other users and to assign roles;

o   VRE Data Managers have the right to register/unregister datasets and make them available to all Users of the VRE;

o  VRE Users can upload and manage data within dedicated VRE(s) according to their authorization level.

Users can apply to a Moderated or a Public Virtual Research Environment:

o   Access to the Moderated VREs is restricted. The acceptance of an application issued by a user is solely under the responsibility of the VRE Manager that has to verify that the user belongs to the community operating the VRE.

o   Access to the Public VRE is regulated by an automatic procedure that grants the access to any user applied for it.

By exploiting a VRE you shall be deemed to accept the conditions of use reported in the following sections.

Posting Content on D4Science.org Infrastructure Services

o   You can post content to any D4Science.org Service only if (a) you created and own the rights to the content or you have the owner’s express permission to post the content; and (b) the content does not infringe any other person’s or entity’s rights (including the copyrights, trademarks, or privacy rights) or violate any applicable laws, this Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, our Community Best Practices, or any other posted policies. The D4Science.org Infrastructure can remove content for any infringing reason.

o   You are responsible for any content you post to our Services and the consequences of sharing or publishing such content with others or the general public. This includes, for example, any personal information, any confidential data or any unofficial data. D4Science.org Infrastructure is not responsible for the consequences of sharing or posting any personal or other information on its services.

o   When you use a service to upload content into a VRE, you retain the irrevocable, exclusive, worldwide right and license to use, reproduce, modify, display, remix, re-distribute, create derivative works, and syndicate your content in any medium and through any service. Only where you have specifically shared, or used a specialized service for sharing data, will your data become part of a derivative work to be licensed under a schema selected by the owner.

Shared Data

o   D4Science.org offers data sharing and publication at different levels: within a VRE, among different VREs and by publication to data repositories that may be accessible to external users.

o   Each shared or published set of data is associated to a copyright license. A CC BY-SA license is proposed if the dataset is obtained with a mash up process from different sources (a true derivative product), any other license (not technically supported by D4Science.org) in case of unaltered product shared with other Users/VREs. In both cases the metadata must be filled (if not automatically compiled) and a preferred citation must be indicated.

o  When you use a Service that allows users to share, publish, transform, readapt, modify, or combine user content with other content, you grant D4Science.org and our Users an irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty free, perpetual, worldwide right and license to [use, reproduce, modify, display, remix, perform, distribute, redistribute, adapt, promote, create derivative works, and syndicate] your content [in any medium and through any form of technology or distribution] and to permit any derivative works to be licensed under these same license terms.

o   Any user accessing either shared or published data must behave according to the copyright license of the dataset. However, the e-Infrastructure does not control or audit access to and / or audit use of shared data. It can therefore not impose a shared data policy, but can encourage sharing according to best practices.

o   Exposing data within the D4Science.org infrastructure (i.e. either sharing or publishing through one or more VREs) will make them accessible only to authorized users, and cannot be accessed from outside. 

Public Data

o   The VRE authorized Users can publish data and make it available to the public exposing to general view with no restrictions except for a registration procedure. Each published set of data is associated to a copyright license.

o   Published data can be accessed by the general public through the D4Science.org site and through dedicated web applications (e.g. web services).

Secondary Use

o  Data accessed through the D4Science.org Gateway do not, and should not, include controls over its end use. However, as the data owner or authoritative source for the data, the submitting Organizations or Institutions must retain version control of datasets accessed.

o   Once the data have been downloaded from the Gateway, the D4Science.org Infrastructure cannot vouch for their quality and timeliness.

o   The D4Science.org Infrastructure cannot vouch for any analyses conducted with data retrieved from the Gateway.

Derivative Work and Data Citation

o   Derivative work should only be produced by complying with the terms and conditions established in the license of the used dataset(s).

o   The derivative work is owned by the legitimate copyright holder identified among the contributors co-owning the new product and is the contact point for any use, re-use/re-distribute request.

o   Derivative work may contain data retrieved from the D4Science.org Infrastructure.

o   Every dataset should include in its metadata at least a preferred citation, a reference to the infrastructure source dataset and it’s generation date, and the date that data were accessed or retrieved from the Gateway or any of its services. If the dataset was a composition of multiple datasets with different citations, the owner of the dataset should have added that to the relevant metadata.

o   If such derivative work is produced through VREs, D4Science.org generates a default provenance metadata, which matches references to sources used for the derivative work and their respective citations.

o   You must clearly state that “D4Science.org cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data have been retrieved from the D4Science.org Infrastructure”.