Terms and Conditions for Users

 1. Terms

1.1 These Terms and Conditions explain the terms on which you can submit proposals for access to Services from Service Provider under the canSERV Transnational Access (TNA) Programme. 

Please read these terms carefully before submitting any content: by submitting a proposal or participating in a proposal team, you accept these terms, and you agree to abide by them. If you do not agree to these terms, you may not use the site to make submissions. 

2. Access to Service Provider’s Service

2.1 User’s status does not convey any entitlement to statutory health, nursing care, accident, unemployment or pension cover. In that case when the User must travel to the service provider facility, it is strongly recommended that User should arrange adequate insurance cover prior to traveling. 

2.2 Users acknowledge that the Service Provider will have sole responsibility and freedom for allocating and scheduling usage of the services and equipment needed for User’s experiment(s) and that the Service Provider may reallocate time or withdraw the offer of service provision for use of the facilities at their own discretion. 

2.3 In the case where Users request to postpone a scheduled visit, Users must inform the Service Provider of their request without undue delay in due time. Under such circumstances, the Service Provider reserves the right to withdraw admission, if re-scheduling is not possible due to lack of capacity or other operational reason. 

2.4 Users are subject to the administrative and technical supervision and control of the Service Provider’s facilities and shall comply with all applicable legislative requirements as well as all applicable policies with regard to access to and use of the facility, including but not limited to training, safety, operating procedures, data policy, environment protection, access to information, experimental data, IT security, and general conduct. Service Provider’s facilities shall provide timely and complete information to Users on the applicable policies and internal regulations. Service Provider shall not be liable for any accidents or infringements arising from a visit. 

2.5 Users shall treat the Service Provider’s facilities with due care and protect these against loss or damage. 

3. Application for Calls

3.1By submitting an application, Users represent and warrant that their research proposal contains only information which is true, accurate and complete. If BBMRI-ERIC has reasonable grounds to suspect that any information supplied is untrue, inaccurate, out-of-date or incomplete, BBMRI-ERIC reserves the right to suspend or terminate the registration and any access Users may have to services. 

3.2 Users warrant that all research activities are conducted in accordance with the generally accepted rules for good scientific practice. Research should be conducted to the highest levels of integrity, including appropriate research design and frameworks, to ensure that findings are robust and defensible. Users should also adhere to the highest level of research ethics, in line with requirements set out by national and international regulatory bodies, professional and regulatory research guidance and research ethics frameworks issued in appropriate areas. 

3.3 By submitting an application, Users grants to BBMRI-ERIC and the Service Provider a revocable and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, modify, prepare derivative works of and otherwise use and disclose the content for the purposes of evaluating the research proposal and assessing the feasibility of conducting the proposed research at the requested facility. In addition, Users grant to BBMRI-ERIC a perpetual and irrevocable licence to store a copy of the research proposal for its records. 

3.4 BBMRI-ERIC will use its reasonable endeavours to keep research applications and proposals confidential and will only disclose research proposals to those third parties for whom it considers access reasonably necessary to perform the evaluation or where required by law. 

4. Intellectual Property

4.1 The Service Provider(s) and the User(s) remain the owner of their respective Background IP, which may include work created prior to the proposal that may be used in the experiment. Background IP may also include registered IP rights, specific know-how, software and existing data. The Parties shall not have any rights to the Background IP of the other Party. 

4.2 Each Party hereby grants the other Party an irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive license, without the right of sublicense to use its Background IP during the experiment, and only for the purpose of carrying out the experiment, but for no other purpose. 

4.3 Each Party will solely own the Foreground IP generated during the implementation of the experiment by its own personnel and/or researchers (Users or Service Provider’s Staff), without using the resources of the other Party, regardless of the place of the research and development activity. Such Foreground IP owner hereby grants the other Party an irrevocable, royalty-free, nonexclusive license to use such Foreground IP for carrying out the experiment, but for no other purpose. 

4.4 Foreground IP arising from a joint activity and/or by the personnel of both Parties shall be jointly owned as Joint IP. Their share in the Foreground IP shall be determined in accordance with the significance of the respective inventive contribution to the Joint IP and Parties shall conclude a joint ownership agreement regarding the terms thereof. Upon finishing the experiment Joint IP shall be received by the Parties in identical form. Each Party hereby shall use non-exclusively and royalty-free, Joint IP, for carrying out the experiment. 

4.5 A Joint IP license agreement shall be discussed and set forth between the Service Provider’s facilities and the User(s) in a timely manner prior to seeking any Intellectual Property rights on such Foreground, and/or prior to any industrial and commercial exploitation by either Party and/or by any third parties. Such license agreement shall be drafted in consistency with each Party’s institution intellectual property management rules and applicable legislation. 

4.6 Before beginning a research activity, Users must disclose any knowledge of an intellectual property claim that may be infringed by the proposed work. This includes knowledge of infringed patents, trademarks and copyrights. In case of research activity, involves the use of Third-Party IP, Users must ensure that they have the necessary rights to do so.  

5. Publication and Acknowledgement

5.1 Service Provider(s) are committed to strengthening research, technology development, and innovation in Europe by ensuring the widest possible dissemination of and access to RI’s results, including open access to the scientific publications derived from publicly-funded research conducted at the Service Provider’s facilities. 

5.2 By accepting these Terms and Conditions, the Users granted access to the Service Provider(s) agree to: 

•  Make all publications arising from research carried out at the Service Provider available within the repository set up by User’s university or institution, if any 
• Give all publications arising from research carried out at the Service Provider within the repository set up by User’s university or institution, if any 
• Provide information without undue delay to BBMRI-ERIC on the publication, including the complete reference and the abstract of all papers appearing in print, and resulting from the use of Service Provider’s instruments and expertise, 
• Acknowledge the financial support of the canSERV project for experiments financed wholly or partially by canSERV, by including appropriate reference in the acknowledgements of the publication. In published material, please acknowledge the use of canSERV consortium, expertise and resource contributions using the following text: “This work benefited from access to the [Name of Service Provider], part of the [Name of Research Infrastructure] research infrastructure. Financial support was provided by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 101058620 canSERV.”  

5.3 For the purpose of these Terms and Conditions, the obligations of acknowledgement referred to above shall be understood as applying to any formal dissemination of the results whether in hardcopy, electronic, web-based or other tangible forms. It includes refereed and non-refereed books and journals, webpages, conference presentations, data deposited in data banks, creative works, technical papers, press releases etc 

5.4 BBMRI-ERIC and the Service Provider(s) consider research data to be valuable results of operations contributing to the sharing and dissemination of knowledge across the European Research Area. Results of publicly supported research should in principle be made publicly available. BBMRI-ERIC and the Service Provider aim to preserve and manage Data according to the ‘FAIR’ principles, meaning that Data shall be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and organised in Reusable datasets. 

6. Data Management

canSERV will develop and further update a Data Management Plan that will describe the data management life cycle for all data sets that will be collected, processed, or generated by this project. 

7. Privacy Policy

Personal data relating to User’s proposal submission will be stored securely according to GDPR regulations and will be used for the purposes of processing the application, scientific and technial review and evaluation, communications and managing the services. The Privacy Policy is available here.

8. Non-compliance

BBMRI-ERIC retains the right to withdraw User’s access to the Service Provider’s facilities upon breach of any of the provisions of these Terms and Conditions, including non-compliance with any applicable internal policies, regulations of Service Provider’s facilities or any reasonable instructions of BBMRI-ERIC.  

9. Changes

In the event that BBMRI-ERIC chooses to modify these Terms and Conditions, any such changes will be made available on the website, ensuring that Users always have access to the most current version. Users are expected to check this document from time to time to take notice of any changes: such changes are binding on you.