Copyright and data security
Intellectual property and copyright
IIASA follows the rules and procedures laid out in the institute’s Patent and Software policies. The Patent Policy ensures that any invention made in the course of the research activities at IIASA is used to bring about the widest possible benefits. This includes that the institute gains financially from any commercial exploitation of patents resulting from the use of its resources, and that favorable terms are applied in granting licenses to organizations and citizens of National Member Organization countries. The Software Policy defines and protects the intellectual property rights for software that has been developed by IIASA staff, and outlines the processes for commercialization, licensing, and distribution.
IIASA follows the rules and procedures laid out in the institute’s Copyright Policy. This takes into consideration the practices of international journals and publishers, and aims to facilitate the widest possible dissemination of IIASA results. In 2017, as part of the internal review of all policies at IIASA, the External Relations, Communications, and Library Department began updating the Copyright Policy, taking into account the latest developments in academic publishing, open access publishing, and the use of creative commons licenses to expand the sharing and uptake of IIASA research.
Data management and archive policies
The IIASA rules laid out in its policies on Good Scientific Practice and Conflict of Interest, constitute the institute’s current data archiving standard.
To comply with the requirements of research funders and other collaborators, IIASA policy stipulates that all primary research data must be retained for a minimum of 10 years, thus ensuring the reproducibility of findings and results. In addition, model-based work, model specifications, and methods of analysis have to be sufficiently documented, ideally in a peer-reviewed publication or its official supplement.
To expand and formalize this policy, the Open Access to Data Task Force, which is comprised of researchers, the IIASA Library team, and IT experts, continue their deliberations. In 2017, this taskforce took stock of the status of data and research tools, and produced two separate inventory catalogues detailing all IIASA datasets, software, tools, and models to include access links to relevant details. In conjunction with the IIASA Library, the taskforce established a prototype Data Repository based on the same technology as the institute’s highly successful Publications Repository (PURE). An improved Research Data Management policy, which is necessary to ensure the long term archival and open availability of IIASA’s wealth of datasets, models, and tools, has also been drafted and is currently under review. The goal is to fully implement the new policy in 2018.
Information technology and data security
The Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Department provides the complete range of IT services essential to IIASA with a necessary focus of reliability and security. To ensure that ICT resources at IIASA keep pace with the ever-growing needs of scientific research, the Head of ICT chairs the ICT Forum. This ICT Forum serves as an advisory and steering body providing a critical link between the ICT Department and the scientific programs. As a result of the guidance provided by the ICT Forum in 2017, the IIASA scientific IT portfolio was expanded to include LINUX-based scientific computing capabilities in addition to its existing Microsoft Windows and Solaris UNIX-based facilities. A new 250 terabyte data storage system was also installed to continue servicing the growing data storage needs of the institute’s research efforts. This new system expands the total data storage capacity of IIASA to more than 450 terabytes with the potential to go beyond two petabytes.
Data protection and privacy
As a publisher and provider of research, IIASA is subject to the Austrian Media Act, the Austrian E-Commerce Act, Austrian Copyright Law, and Austrian Intellectual Property Law.
The institute is the custodian and processor of personal data concerning both its staff and other individuals associated with the institute. The institute periodically sends bulk mails to some of its contacts for a variety of reasons, ranging from asking them to attend an event, to encouraging them to use IIASA research.
In light of the above, the institute is obligated to follow the provisions of Austrian Data Protection Law (e.g., Datenschutz-Grundverordnung (DSGVO)). In turn, as a member of the European Union, Austria has to ensure that the DSGVO complies with the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into effect on 25 May 2018.
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