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Data sharing and publishing

FAQ: Data sharing & publishing​

Who is my data shared with? On eDNA Explorer, data can either be private or public. By default eDNA Explorer keeps your data private, meaning only the person who uploaded it, their project team and the eDNA Explorer team can see it to ensure its accuracy. However, you can choose to make the data public for everyone to see by clicking the Publish button.

While you own all of your data, we may use your data in a deidentified way to improve our organism assignment algorithm and inform our decontamination and ecosystem analysis algorithms.

What data is shared when I Publish my data? The following is shared when you make your date public by clicking the Publish button:

  • Project methodology

  • Tables and charts that show different types of organisms

  • Information about where and when the samples were taken (metadata)

This public data is meant to be shared with other groups so they can do more research and analysis. Publishing and sharing data is strongly encouraged.

What rules do you have for data that is publicly shared? eDNA Explorer doesn't put any rules on how public data is used or shared. We do not check for patents, copyrights or any rights restrictions that are claimed by submitters and do not claim any ownership of the data in our databases. As a result, we do not enforce how the information in our databases can be used, copied, or shared.

Source document: Google Doc