Community Guidelines

By using this data portal, you are agreeing to abide by the guidelines outlined on this page. Please contact the portal's Steering Committee if you have questions or concerns about any of the guidance provided herein.

Contents
For Data Providers | For Data Users | Data Citations & Attribution | Statement on Responsible Fossil Collecting

For Data Providers

By providing data to this portal, you are agreeing to:

• Only share data to which your institution maintains legal rights.
• Share data under one of the following Creative Commons licenses: CC0, CC-BY, or CC-BY-NC.
• Only share data that represent vouchered specimen occurrences curated in a publicly accessible permanent repository, e.g. at a university collection or non-profit museum. Collections data from academic laboratories and similar entities may be considered if accompanied by 1) a formal repository agreement from a permanent collection and 2) written permission to contribute to this data portal from the repository.

Additional Considerations

• If all or parts of your collection require locality redaction, please carefully review the documentation on data redaction in Symbiota portals.
• This data portal resides on servers at Arizona State University (ASU) that are actively maintained by the Symbiota Support Hub. While maintaining your data on this infrastructure is one benefit of using an ASU-hosted Symbiota portal, data providers are urged to regularly download data backups. Please review the Symbiota Support Hub's Statement on Cybersecurity for more information on this topic.
• Thanks to support from the US National Science Foundation, contributing specimen occurrence records to this Symbiota portal is presently free of charge (NSF Awards 2324688, 2324689, and 2324690). Please review Sustaining Symbiota Services for more information on the Symbiota Support Hub's sustainability planning initiatives.

For Data Users

By using data in this portal, you are agreeing to give attribution to data providers according to the licenses and usage rights specified on the collection profile(s) in this portal. When in doubt, reach out to the relevant listed contact(s) for more information. Additionally:

• It is incumbent upon data users to use the information available in this portal responsibly. The Symbiota Support Hub, the portal's Steering Committee members, and their affiliated institutions cannot assume responsibility for damages resulting from misuse or misinterpretation of data made available in this portal, or from errors or omissions that may exist in the data.
• Images and other multimedia available within this portal have been contributed to promote research and education. The original data contributors retain full copyright to these media records unless indicated otherwise on their respective portal profiles. When in doubt, contact the appropriate data provider(s) before reusing any imagery or other media found in this portal.
• Data users are asked not to redistribute data obtained from this site without written permission from the data's respective owner(s). However, links or references to the portal may be freely posted.
• Requests to view redacted data must be directed to the appropriate listed contacts. Please do not contact the portal Steering Committee or the Symbiota Support Hub for access to redacted information in this portal.
• Many records available in this data portal are actively being curated, cleaned, and managed, and, as such, they are made available "as is". Any errors in the data should be directed to the appropriate listed contact(s). You may also leave comments on individual occurrence records of concern.

Data Citations & Attribution

It is considered a matter of professional ethics to cite and acknowledge the contributions of others that have resulted in subsequent works. Likewise, proper citation of collections data is critical to sustaining these resources and the reproducibility of your research. If you use data acquired from this portal in any forthcoming products, the following citation formats are strongly suggested for giving attribution to the data providers. While formatting may vary by citation style, at minimum, you should specify the URL to the original data source in your citation, be it for citing the portal, a specific collection, an occurrence record, a checklist, a dataset, or otherwise. Data users are also strongly encouraged to contact the original investigator responsible for the data that they are accessing.

How to cite...

This portal:

Symbiota Paleo Data Portal. Year. https://paleodata.biokic.asu.edu. Accessed on YYYY-MM-DD.

Occurrence data from specific institutions:

Refer to individual collection profile pages to find the available citation formats.

Example:

Name of Institution or Collection. Occurrence dataset https://paleodata.biokic.asu.edu/portal/content/dwca/ accessed via the Symbiota Paleo Data Portal, https://paleodata.biokic.asu.edu, 2022-07-25.

Collections published to GBIF:

Refer to GBIF's guidance and include the GBIF-minted DOI in the citation. If a collection in this portal has also been published to GBIF, a green widget will be present on the relevant profile page, as will a URL to the corresponding GBIF dataset.

Statement on Responsible Fossil Collecting

The data available in this portal have been derived from specimens that have been carefully collected, documented, prepared, and curated for scientific research. Collecting fossils requires permission from the applicable landowner(s), regardless of whether the specimen(s) originated on private or public lands. Moreover, scientific collecting efforts should be coordinated with an accredited institution that maintains a publicly accessible research collection. The Paleontological Society's Code of Fossil Collecting, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's Code of Ethics, and the Geological Society of America's statement on Responsible Geologic Fieldwork Practices provides additional guidance on responsible and ethical fossil collecting practices.

Acknowledgments

This portal's header image is from the Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 95, Box 62B, Folder 21, Image No. SIA_000095_B62B_F21_006 (CC0).

The “trilocorn” image included in the portal's footer and favicon was created by Molly Phillips. The trilocorn is PDWG's mascot.

This portal is made possible by funding from US National Science Foundation awards 2324688, 2324689, and 2324690.