Curation Costs Exchange—Terms and Conditions, and Privacy Policy

We want you to use our tools.  In particular we want you to be comfortable using our tools and to understand clearly the implications of clicking on Register or Save buttons.  We want to be fair, transparent and aim to achieve ToS;DR Class A badges^[1] across the board for all our terms and conditions.

Broadly speaking these terms and conditions and privacy policy relate to your personal information (things like your name, your email address, and so on), your business information (including any cost information) and your use of this web site.

Personal Information

So let’s start with the information that relates to you personally.  To make best use of our tools you need to register on the site.  Many (but not all) of the tools and services require registration before you can access them. Why?  Well we need to be able to communicate with you (at the very least when you forget your password and we need to send you reset instructions).  We also like to think that you’ll want to come back occasionally and update and/or add to information you may have let us use.  Registration potentially puts you straight back into your “bit”.  In addition we’d like to make sure that those contributing to the site are who they say they are (Spam sucks).  Registration helps us do just that.

Occasionally we may email you information related to the 4C project and/or the services and tools we provide.  It’s unlikely that such communications will be more frequent than once a month.

If you register with us we will not pass your personal information on to any third party without your express permission.

Business information

The business information we gather relates to the type, location and mission of your organisation.  We also collect and store information relating to the costs you associate with data curation.  In an ideal world everyone would be totally open with their costs.  However, we recognise that this is not an ideal world and different organisations may not always be able to share everything.   When you first set-up an organisation to assign costs to we ask you to select the degree of openness you’re comfortable with.  The levels we have selected are:

• Allow the use of anonymised cost data to calculate averages^[2] in the global comparison result.
• Allow the use of anonymised cost data for peer comparisons.
• Allow registered users to make contact contact through the site
• Allow cost data to be shared with registered users
• Allow snapshots of anonymised cost data to be collected periodically

If you enter business data on our system us we not pass that detailed source information on to any third party without your express permission.

At the end of the day it’s your source data, but the processing and analysis is done by us and belongs to us.  We want to clarify the costs of curation and the analysis is part of what will help us to do just that.

Use of the web site

We’re not selling a service; you’re not buying a service so “service level agreements” are a bit of a red herring here.  However, we will do our best to keep the site up and running.  Inevitably there will be down time, but we’ll try and keep you informed should that become necessary.  We’ll also use our best endeavours to ensure that the site and data used on it remain safe and protected.

We’ re providing a community driven and enabled service.  To be truly useful we depend upon you the users to enter accurate information, preferably on a regular^[3] basis.  With this in mind we’re asking you to spend a little time and care adding your data.  The better (and the more comprehensive and accurate) the data in is, the better the results out will be.

We don’t control the input of data and can’t be held liable for the efficacy or accuracy of any results.  In other words, to use the information gleaned here as the sole basis for a mission critical business decision would be the height of foolishness.  The information we show is but part of the equation and should be treated as such.  We can’t guarantee its accuracy of fitness for purpose.

We’re also providing a forum for discussion and the facility to make comments on various pages.  We like strong opinions and carefully crafted arguments.  We don’t like abuse and spam.  Respect the opinions of others—or rather respect their right to express their opinions—and we’ll get along fine.  Abuse and spam are likely to lead to loss of privileges (in other words, we’ll disable your account).

Whilst you’re using the site we may use cookies to keep your session alive and personalised to your log-in (and to gather site use analytics).

Our cookies help us:

• Make our website work as you'd expect
• Save you having to login every time you visit the site
• Improve the speed/security of the site
• Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook

We do not use cookies to:

• Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
• Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
• Pass data to advertising networks
• Pass personally identifiable data to third parties

Q&A

How do you know someone is who they say they are (for instance, they may be pretending to represent my organisation?)

We do check, but our resources are limited so if you do spot something you think is suspicious please let us know.

What if someone appears to be deliberately abusing the services and tools?

We will investigate and take appropriate steps which may even include removing the individual from our systems.

How do you know the cost information is correct?

In short, we don’t.  We do our best to ensure that appropriate and factual information is entered, but these are community driven tools/services and people make mistakes.  If you see something that’s looks as if it’s not right let us know and we’ll look into it.

You keep referring to “We” in the terms above.  Just who is “We” in this context?

“We” are the 4C Project. The 4C project is a consortium of 13 partners in 7 different countries who have come together as part of a European funded project in a Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation (hence 4C).

What happens if/when the project ends?

Your personal information will be archived by a nominated partner or destroyed.  Your business information will be retained by a nominated partner in order to allow the web site to outlast the project.

What happens if/when the project gets taken over by another organisation?

Your personal information will only be transferred with your express permission.  Should you choose to opt out aggregations of your business information may be retained insofar as it allows the website to continue to function.  Data snapshots won’t be transferred but may be retained by one more of the original partners for research purposes.

What happens if a new partner organisation joins the 4C project and I really don’t want them to see my business information?

Should such a situation arise we’ll inform users before the partner joins and will allow you to opt out.  We’ll keep the aggregations of the business information (that cannot be linked back to your organisation and which will have been incorporated into results sets).  We’d also like to keep the anonymised detail information, and the data in snapshots but that will only be with your permission.

What’s to stop you from suddenly changing your terms and conditions and privacy policy?

We won’t change them without first drawing the potential change to your attention.