General Rules on the Use of Data

The data in this database are made available to support research, education, and informed decision-making. BRAIN default use of data licence agreement for uploaded datasets is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International ("CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International") licence.

Users must adhere to the following principles:

1. Responsible Use – Data must be used ethically and only for legitimate scientific, educational, or policy-related purposes.

2. Attribution – Users must properly cite the database and acknowledge data providers in any publication or product derived from the data.

3. Non-commercial Use – The data must not be used for commercial purposes.

4. Data Integrity – Users must not alter the original data or fabricate any additional information inside of the dataset. Any derived datasets should clearly indicate any modification applied.

Open or restricted data?

Datasets included in BRAIN can either accessed openly or restrictedly. Open data are free to use, share and adapt by all individuals, provided that the owners are acknowledged, and the relevant reference cited, in any use or publication. Restricted data are not freely downloadable from the database can be accessed by directly submitting a request to info.brain@unimore.it. The data owner(s) will be contacted and asked for permission to use the requested data. Users interested in gaining access to restricted data are encouraged to provide brief information about their project for the data owner.

How to acknowledge BRAIN?

Any product that involves data received via the BRAIN database must cite both the relevant works for each dataset used and BRAIN (Mercuri et al. 2024*; Mercuri et al., 2015**).

* Mercuri A.M., Clò E., Zappa J., Bosi G., Furia E., Ricucci C., Di Lena M., Camerini F., Florenzano A., 2024. BRAIN - Holocene archaeo-data for assessing plant-cultural diversity in Italy and other Mediterranean region. Scientific Data 11, 520. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03346-5).
** Mercuri A.M., Allevato E., Arobba D., Bandini Mazzanti M., Bosi G., Caramiello R., Castiglioni E., Carra M.L., Celant A., Costantini L., Di Pasquale G., Fiorentino G., Florenzano A., Guido M., Marchesini M., Mariotti Lippi M., Marvelli S., Miola A., Montanari C., Nisbet R., Peña-Chocarro L., Perego R., Ravazzi C., Rottoli M., Sadori L., Ucchesu M., Rinaldi R., 2015. Pollen and macroremains from Holocene archaeological sites: a dataset for the understanding of the bio-cultural diversity of the Italian landscape. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 218, 250-266. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.revpalbo.2014.05.010

How to contribute to the BRAIN database?

The data in BRAIN has been provided by the network on a voluntary basis and is made available according to the preferences decided by the owners. Where applicable, taxon names are standardised according to the criteria established by the TWG-PBP Network. Researchers that wish to contribute to the BRAIN database have to contact info.brain@unimore.it