Revised Implementation for ISO Proprietary Rights

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The policy for proprietary rights is contained in:

• the SPC-approved ISO Science Management Plan:
  
  
  "They [the data] will be made available for access 12 months after their original release to the guest observer"
  
  
  
• the Calls for Observing Proposals:
  
  "The 1 year period shall start from the time when the data are delivered to the Principal Investigator of that proposal in a usable form, i.e. appropriate data processing having been applied and with suitable calibrations from the ISO Science Operations Centre. For programmes which have their observations distributed throughout the lifetime of ISO, the 1-year period shall start from the delivery to the observer of the last observation in the programme."

No change is planned to the above policy.

Up to June 1997, the above policy has been _implemented_ by linking "usable" to "scientific validation". This implementation was put into place at a time when full scientific validation was expected for all products within a few months of the end of the Performance Verification Phase. However, the actual dates of scientific validation have been as follows:

for C01, C03, C04, L01, L02:	13/05/96 OLP v. 4.0
for S01, S02, S06, S07, P40:	18/08/96 OLP v. 5.0
for some of remaining PHT observations	05/05/97 OLP v. 6.0
for rest of remaining PHT observations	TBD but around April '98.

Thus, for each programme, the key dates are (a) the date of the last observation in the programme and (b) the date(s) of scientific validation of the AOTs used. Among the consequences of the above implementation are:

• Any programme with PHT observations will not become public until 12 months after last PHT mode used is validated and data shipped.
• About 130 programmes (of the approximately 930 in the data base) which do not contain PHT observations have been completed. Of these 130, only ~12 are guaranteed time programmes. Thus, the data which would become public first come mainly from small-ish completed open time programmes using the other instruments.

Taking into account the improvements incorporated into the latest version of the pipeline (May 1997) together with: the availability of interactive (and non- interactive) analysis packages; and the number of ISO papers in, or entering, the literature, it is clear that the current pipeline products meet a reasonable definition of "usable".

Thus, the new implementation of the (unchanged) policy will be as follows:

• All ISO data associated with a specific programme will enter the public domain 12 months after the date on which the last observation in that programme, processed with version 6.0 (or higher) of the pipeline, was shipped to the Observer.

This implementation will enter into effect immediately.

For example;

Suppose you have four observations in a programme, a CAM AOT executed in 02/96, a PHT AOT executed in 10/96, a LWS AOT executed in 02/97 and an SWS AOT executed in 06/97. You would have already received the data from the CAM, PHT and LWS observations but processed with pipelines earlier than 6.0. The SWS data would be processed with v. 6.0 and shipped to you. Over the next months, the SOC will re-process with version 6.0 or higher and re-ship all data. Thus, you would re-receive the CAM, PHT and LWS data products but from a better pipeline. Let us suppose that the CAM products arrive last. Your proprietary period for all 4 observations would then start from the date we shipped the re-processed CAM data.

Best regards,
Martin F. Kessler,
ISO Project Scientist