Hi NBN staff - just a nudge before this disappears too far down the page, any advice on this please? Sorry if being dense.

Cheers

Andy

Thanks Giselle. I'm a bit surprised, and may be guilty of not having understood in advance. But I note that on our main BTO dataset, almost a million records have already been downloaded for the stated reason of "environmental assessment". For a dataset that is licensed as CC-BY-NC, this is clearly somewhat questionable.

As I understand it, people can't download records without being logged in. Are you telling me that dataset owners are not allowed to know who it is that is downloading their records? Isn't that a standard function that was in the Australian and Scottish atlases? I realise I could check, but it seems extraordinary if not.

Thanks for any further clarification.....?

Another thought. We've been assured that the first phase of Atlas development was to replicate the existing functionality of the Gateway. The download logs from the Gateway do indeed provide name and email address of the person downloading the data. Hence I think it's reasonable to assume that the Atlas should be doing so too?

In terms of data protection, I wouldn't necessarily be advocating that the details of the downloader should be visible to the public, but they surely should be accessible to the dataset provider? If necessary, inform the person when they do the download.

I apologise if I should have been asking this earlier. I'd kind of assumed it went without saying....?

Thanks

Hi Andy and Mark
I agree that having information about who is using our datasets is useful. Analysis of our Gateways stats was always more informative if we the e-mail address of the user (often gives a clue to the institution/group/company) as the use reason was so vague e.g. students using data for projects often put down "personal reasons" rather than education.  This was important as it helped us justify our existence to our funders.
The CC-BY-NC license depends on trust and although a small group has no weight in policing the system, larger organisations could be more effective in reminding the abusers that they have responsibilities when it comes to using the records on NBN covered by the NC terms.

Christine

Thanks Christine and Sarah. I've sent a quick query off to Jo directly also. Looking forward to response - and I do appreciate you're busy!

Best wishes

Hi Darwyn - I've had information provided directly, but the functionality is not yet built into the system to use automatically as far as I'm aware.

Cheers

Andy

Just a little reminder on this topic in order to flag it as an important issue. The only figures I can get at the moment are the numbers of some substantial downloads of our Dipterists Forum Field Week records - unhelpfully described as "other". It would be so very useful to be able to inform our record contributors as to the purpose of these downloads in order to encourage future submissions. Feedback is very important to ensure continued support of the system.