Data sharing: An open access
The fundamental operating principle of the India Biodiversity Portal is large-scale participation, to provide free and open access to biodiversity data. All contributed data will be available freely on the Internet.
Such biodiversity data, that will be updated, validated, and authentic, is essential for conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, better management of natural resources, asserting intellectual property rights over biodiversity, policy-making, education, and public awareness. The India biodiversity Portal asserts no rights on the data available on the portal. The data providers retain all rights and responsibilities associated with the data they make available. The data providers determine the licensing regime under which they would like to provide access to the data. These must be under the variety of creative commons licenses supported by the portal. Data providers should describe the data source, methodology for the collection of the data, reliability, quality including spatial precision of the data. This will enable users to validate the data and to determine the appropriateness of the data for their own purposes.
A public good
The India Biodiversity Portal provides open and free access of the information available on the portal. We consider information on biodiversity a public good, to be ethically and rightfully used, and based on trust and goodwill. In all situations users should provide clear and unambiguous attribution to the data source. We believe attribution is essential for building a partnership between data providers and data users; build a trustful community interested in biodiversity; and openly encourage participation and data use. We believe accurate, open, and free access to biodiversity information enables better conservation of rare, threatened, endemic and indigenous species. Documenting and publishing local knowledge of the biodiversity, asserts the rights of the community over the biodiversity. It clearly establishes intellectual property rights over bio-discovery and utilization of biological resources. We believe well articulated information reinforces unalienable community rights over bioresources and its utilization, by establishing the principle of prior art, reinforcing geographical indicators of bio-resource (http://www.patentoffice.nic.in/ipr/gi/gi_faq.htm) and asserting local knowledge on biodiversity. There could be data on the portal that has been obtained by forging specific partnerships with the data producer, or purchased and is proprietary. Some of the basal data required for geo-referencing and geographical visualizations would be proprietary. Such data may be restrictive and will be governed by the copyright terms of the data. These will be view only data, to enhance the visualization and value of other geographical data, and will not be downloadable.
