statement of principles and procedures
Statement of principles
The ViPs project aims to collate, curate and develop virtual lab and fieldtrip resources for palaeoenvironmental teaching and to broaden public interest in environmental change. This material will be made available on-line and will be freely available for use for personal and educational purposes only. Materials are made available through a WordPress site as both a searchable spreadsheet or database listing, and via web links from structured pages.
Those submitting material to the ViPs website and everyone using these resources have certain responsibilities to ensure that its resources can be easily accessed and used appropriately. ViPs will employ a ‘take down’ procedure to help ensure that all material is compatible with IPRs.
Types of resources
We divide the materials collected and shared by ViPs into two categories: submitted LINKS to external sites, and CONTRIBUTIONS which are hosted by the ViPs project itself (e.g. on the ViPs private Youtube channel, as uploads to the WordPress media store, or otherwise).
Links submitted to ViPs
We understand that, as long as the linked material is in the public domain (findable via a google search or similar), we have no legal liability to ensure that the material has properly addressed IPR issues. We will include the IPR information in the spreadsheet of links wherever it is clearly available and will have a clear statement and policy around removal of links which are identified by others as problematic (see Takedown policy and procedure document).
Contributions to ViPs
All those contributing resources directly to ViPs must ensure that they have the legal right to offer this material. All contributors are required to confirm they own all the material they are providing and therefore have the right to share it and for it to be further shared under specific condtions. We ask submitters to confirm this via a check box at the point of submission and strongly recommend that they badge material before submission. A clear link to information about Creative Commons will be provided at the point of submission, including this text:
We strongly recommend that all submissions use this Creative Commons licence:
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Which lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This link provides further details of this licence and other creative commons options can be explored on that website:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Users of ViPs
Everyone using the site’s resources may do so only for personal and educational use. The source of any material that is used elsewhere must be acknowledged and, where appropriate, ViPs should also be acknowledged. The terms and conditions of the use of ViPs contributions must comply with the Creative Commons licence chosen by the submitter, which will generally be the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
‘Take down’ Policy
ViPs has a clear policy it will use to investigate any complaints about material on the website. Resources that do not respect IPRs will be removed following the process set out in the ViPs ‘Take down’ policy and procedure document.
If you have any comments on this policy please submit them using the form below. To report a complaint about materials or a link from this site, please use the form on the takedown policy page.