2. Data Policies

2.1. Data Submission Policies

All data in the TOAR database are openly shared under the CC-BY 4.0 license (see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ for details). We must ask you to give us explicit consent that we are allowed to publish your data under this license. This also implies that we are allowed to curate your data in the manner that is described in TOAR Data Processing.

If you upload your data via the online portal https://toar-data.org/contribute/#timeseries please activate the radio button “I understand that the data will be made freely available under a CC-BY 4.0 license and I confirm that I have the rights to grant such license to the TOAR data centre”. If you submit your data by email (including the data files as attachment or a link to a shared folder), please copy the above sentence into your email so that we can document that you granted us permission to publish your data.

We must also ask you to confirm that you quality-controlled the data which you send to us. In the upload web portal, please activate the radio button “I have read the TOAR data submission guide and confirm that the data submitted here has been obtained with commonly accepted measurement methods and quality controlled according to standard procedures.” Again, if you are submitting your data by email, please copy this sentence into the email text.

2.2. Data Privacy Rules

Please be assured that we take data privacy protection serious. As there are generally no ethical concerns involved in air quality or meteorological data, data privacy protection only applies to the personal information we obtain from you as data providers. Please note that we need to store your name, affiliation and email address in the TOAR database. This also applies to your co-workers who are named as contributors or in other roles (see description of roles in section 3.2 below). Optionally, you can also provide additional contact information such as your phone number, your Orcid id, and the address of your organisation. By default, this limited personal information will not be made available to TOAR database users. This implies that they cannot properly attribute their use of data to you as the data provider. Should you wish your personal information to be made available, please set the corresponding flag to false. All personal data that is processed by the TOAR data centre is handled according to the general data privacy rules (GDPR) of the European Union as expressed by the German Law (DA-GVO). In particular, this means that you have the right to request information about what information about you is stored and you have the right to order corrections or deletion of your personal data. See https://toar-data.fz-juelich.de/footer/privacy.htm for details.