Terms of Use

1. The Collaborative OPen Omics (COPO) website service promotes Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) metadata brokerage through the submission of research objects (raw or processed data, reads, samples, images etc.) which are made public to the research community and public repositories like BioImage Archive (BIA), European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) and National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
2. This service uses cookies to record information about your website session to enable the website to function well. You can control your use of cookies from your web browser but if you choose not to accept cookies from the COPO website service, you will not be able to take full advantage of all of the website's features.
3. This service also uses Google Fonts, a website font service that is owned by Google LLC or by Google Ireland Limited, to provide an interactive web directory via Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) throughout the service.
   
   The Google server needs to collect your Internet Protocol (IP) address in order to send you the Google Font files from the Google servers when you access the service. Through the use of Google Fonts, the website performance is optimised and is displayed more beautiful.
   
   Even though our service self-host Google Fonts on some web pages in order to eliminate violating General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), there are other web pages in our service that do not. By using the service, you consent for the service to use your IP address so that it can load the Google Fonts from the Google servers.
4. COPO will make all reasonable effort to maintain continuity of its service and provide adequate warning of any changes or discontinuities. However, COPO accepts no responsibility for the consequences of any temporary or permanent discontinuity of the service.
5. If you email or submit offensive, inappropriate or objectionable content on our website or to us, or engage in any disruptive behaviour on our service, we may use your personal information from our security logs to stop such behaviour. We may also use your personal information to inform relevant third parties about the content and your behaviour where we reasonably believe that you are or may be in breach of any applicable laws.
6. COPO imposes no additional restrictions on the use of the submitted data available on our service after they have been provided by the metadata submitter other than those provided by the metadata submitters like embargoed metadata. However, there are restrictions imposed on the metadata submitter on the metadata after the metadata have been uploaded and submitted on the COPO service.
   
   Some of these metadata submitter restrictions include but are not limited to the following:
   
   • Profile records cannot be deleted after they have associated research objects like samples, reads, files, sequencing annotations, accessions, barcoding manifests etc..
   • Samples cannot be deleted after they have been submitted; they can only be updated. More details about what field values can be updated can be found in the Updating Samples' section in our documentation.
   • Please see our documentation on the various profile components for Genomics profiles and Tree of Life (ToL) profiles for more information concerning the restrictions and possibilities of the various research objects.
7. All scientific metadata will be made publicly available after data submission and we may store it permanently.
8. The metadata submitted and the COPO Application Programming Interface (API) methods are generated in part from the data contributed by the community who remain the data submitters.
9. COPO does not guarantee the accuracy of any provided metadata for any purpose. We, however, make all reasonable effort to ensure that the metadata submitted are validated according to the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for each manifest type.
   
   Please see our documentation regarding the SOP requirements .
10. The metadata submitted may be subject to embargoed rights or permits rights. It is the responsibility of users of this service to ensure that their exploitation of the data does not infringe any of the rights of such parties.
11. We reserve the right to update these terms of use at any time. We will attempt to give reasonable notice of any changes by placing a notice on our website or by sending an email to any email address you may have provided to us, but you may wish to check the terms of use each time you use the website.
    
    The date of the most recent revision will appear at the bottom of this web page, the 'Terms of Use' web page. If you do not agree to these changes, please do not continue to use our service.
12. Any feedback provided to COPO about its service will be treated as non-confidential unless the individual or organisation providing the feedback states otherwise.
13. Any questions or comments concerning these terms of use can be addressed to us by contacting us. More details about the data that we collect from you when you browse the website, make manifest submissions and how we process the data are detailed in our Privacy Notice.

Last revised: 28-10-2023