We welcome any contributions of literature (published papers or reports) or final datasets that are related to projects within the inventory. Sharing such research projects increases the ease of access to project information by conservation managers and other researchers. This also may satisfy data sharing requirements of funding entities. For published manuscripts, please share the document only if the publisher's permissions allow the document to be shared. We encourage submissions of reports or grey literature associated with projects (e.g., reports to funding entities) in order to increase the availability of this important project information.

OSIS will also serve as a repository for finalized project data such as tabular (e.g., Excel) files, graphics, or ArcGIS shapefiles. Sharing datasets through OSIS or other data repositories increases their availability and conservation value.

We provide the following three levels of availability for shared documents or datasets:

  • Full online access: The document, dataset or file will be listed on the project report page and available for download by any visitor to the OSIS website.
  • Available by request to FWC: The document, dataset or file will be listed on the project report page and available by request to FWC. In this case, we would handle any requests for the files that you have shared with us.
  • Available by request to you, or the research project's point of contact: The document, dataset or file will be listed on the project report page and available by request to you or the point of contact that you specify. In this case, requestors would contact you directly for any listed files or we would forward requests to you.
Data Sharing and Usage Agreement

Users of project summaries, files or datasets shared through OSIS agree to the following terms:

  • Project summary information, publications, reports or data contained within OSIS may not be used in any publication, product or application (commercial or otherwise) without prior written consent of the original data provider(s) who are defined as the project's principal investigator or point of contact.
  • Data obtained from OSIS, with the permission of the data provider(s), must be properly cited when presented in another format. Reports or publications should be cited according to standard scientific citation conventions. If no other citation exists for a record, we recommend a citation which acknowledges the data provider(s) and the OSIS application, for example:
    Doe, Jane A. and Doe, John B. 2017. A study of sea turtles within bay waters. Project summary accessed from the Online Sea Turtle Information System, 15 July 2017.
  • The data provider(s) and the application developers may not be held liable for errors in the data or summary information provided through OSIS.
Data sharing language for research proposals

We encourage researchers to use the following language within their research proposals to describe how their project data will be disseminated:

Summary findings of this project would be made available to researchers and managers through annual updates to the project’s summary within the online sea turtle information system (osis.azurewebsites.net). Within OSIS, information from our project will be part of a sea turtle data repository that is focused on providing management-relevant information on regional in-water sea turtle occurrence and distribution.