INAF Data Policy Document
Data Access Policy for TNG-REM-LBT Data held in the
INAF - IA2 Archive Facility
Prepared by: R. Smareglia, E. Molinari, M. Lodi
Approved by: G. Vettolani
Doc ID: INAF-IA2-PL-003, Rev. 1.0
Date: 1 Feb 2009
The INAF Centre for Astronomical Archives (IA2) facility contains:
- All data from TNG telescope;
- All INAF data from LBT telescope.
- Public data from REM telescope;
The facility, operated by INAF staff, provides access to those data for the Italian and International user community.
The Principal Investigators (PIs) of successful proposals for time on the TNG-REM-LBT telescope have exclusive access to their scientific data for the duration of a proprietary period. At the end of the proprietary period the data will be placed in the public partition of the IA2 archive, together with the abstract of the related proposal for observing time.
This "proprietary period" is subject to the following provisions:
- The duration of the proprietary period is normally 12 months after the date of the last observation (or 12 months after the end of semester for REM) made available to the PI, related to the approved proposal.
- An extension of this proprietary period may be granted in special cases only. The corresponding requests will have to be submitted to the Observing Structures Unit responsible through the IA2 responsible.
- Meta-data that describe the individual exposures, including location and extent of the aperture, instrument configuration, time and duration of the exposure, etc., will be stored in a database that will be searchable by the community immediately upon ingest of the exposure in the IA2 Archive.
- Abstracts of accepted proposals for observing time will be placed in the public partition of the IA2 archive as soon as the related exposures are taken.
- All calibration data, such as darks, flat-fields, and arc-lamps, will not be considered proprietary, and will be made available to the public immediately upon ingestion in the IA2Archive. TNG staff will also provide publicly a frame of one standard star per filter and one star for every spectroscopic setup used during the observation.
- All data will be available to IA2 science and technical staff exclusively for the purposes of:
- monitoring the health and safety of the instruments
- trending the calibration and performance of the instruments
- developing and maintaining calibration software for the instruments
- For any other use of proprietary data, such as educational applications, IA2 will consult the PI.
All data in the IA2 archive remains the property of INAF. INAF reserves the right to restrict or enhance access to the data at any time. The public observations contained in the IA2 archive are available to the national and international communities via registered access or though the Virtual Observatory.
IA2, through the VObs.it project, is partner of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). The aim of the IVOA is to provide the European and global astronomical community with an archival and data handling resource that can meet the needs of 21st century astronomy