Data Access Policy for ESO Data held in the ESO Science Archive Facility

03 Nov 2008

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) Science Archive Facility has been operational at ESO headquarters in Munich since 1991. It contains data from ESO telescopes at La Silla Paranal Observatory, including the APEX submillimeter telescope on Llano de Chajnantor, as well as the UKIDSS/WFCAM data obtained at the UK Infrared Telescope facility in Hawaii. The facility is operated by ESO in collaboration with the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility. It also provides access to Hubble Space Telescope data for the HST user community.

The Principal Investigators (PIs) of successful proposals for time on ESO telescopes have exclusive access to their scientific data for the duration of a proprietary period. Normally this period will expire one year after the data have been made available to the PI in a form that is suitable for scientific analysis. This includes the direct download from the archive of raw data by the PIs, a service that is available since 1st April 2008.

The information contained in the headers of all the frames in the ESO Science Archive is publicly and immediately available. At the end of the proprietary period, also the science data themselves are made publicly available through the ESO Science Archive. The abstracts of successful proposals are made public as well at the time the proprietary period expires. All calibration data are public immediately after the observations.

Exceptions to the above rules, such as the extension of the proprietary period or restrictions to the access of header information, may be granted in special cases only. The corresponding requests have to be justified in detail and submitted to the Director General of ESO.

Some ESO programmes may involve proprietary periods that are specialised to specific programme needs and scientific aims (e.g. immediate international public release). These special cases will be documented through the main ESO archive interface.

All data in the ESO archive remains the property of ESO. ESO reserves the right to restrict or enhance access to the data at any time. The public partition of the ESO archive is accessible to all registered ESO users from within the international astronomical community.

All users of data from the ESO Science Archive Facility are required to acknowledge the source of the data with an appropriate citation in their publications in the form:

Based on data obtained from the ESO Science Archive Facility under request number <name><number>

where <name> is the archive user name of the requester. Alternatively users can also cite the ESO programme ID given to all successful proposals in the form:

Based on observations made with ESO Telescopes at the La Silla Paranal Observatory under programme ID <ppp>.<c-nnnn>

where the <ppp>.<c-nnnn> (period.category-number) is the ID of the ESO observing programme.

Users of the LABOCA instrument at APEX are required to acknowledge the use of calibration observations when these were obtained during the time allocated to another of the APEX partners (the Max-Planck Institut fuer Radioastronomie and the Onsala Space Observatory) or to Chile as host country.