Difference between revisions of "Species-ID:Terms of Use"

Latest revision as of 18:39, 25 May 2018

The present site is an online open-content collaborative knowledge base, created by a voluntary association of individuals and groups working to develop a common resource of human knowledge. The structure of the project allows many contributors to alter its content. Therefore, we cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here.

None of the contributors, service sponsors, administrators, or anyone else connected with the project in any way whatsoever can be responsible for the appearance of any inaccurate or libelous information or for your use of the information contained in or linked from these web pages, other than the contributor who made the contribution himself or herself.

Where authors have affiliations with government or private institutions, the views, and opinions expressed here are strictly those of the page authors. Unless otherwise stated, the content has not been reviewed or approved by the respective institution.

This disclaimer is to be considered as part of the Internet publication from which you were referred.

No contract – limited license

Please make sure that you understand that the information provided here is being provided freely and that no kind of agreement or contract is created between you and the owners or users of this site, the owners of the servers upon which it is housed, the individual contributors, any project administrators, system operators or anyone else who is in any way connected with this project or sister projects subject to your claims against them directly. You are being granted a limited license to copy anything from this site; it does not create or imply any contractual or extra-contractual liability on the part of this project or any of its agents, members, organizers or other users.

There is no agreement or understanding between you and this project regarding your use or modification of this information beyond the Copyright and License conditions.

Trademarks

Any of the trademarks, service marks, collective marks, design rights or similar rights that are mentioned, used or cited in the articles are the property of their respective owners. Their use here does not imply that you may use them for any other purpose other than for the same or a similar informational use as contemplated by the original authors of these articles under the Creative Commons licensing scheme. Unless otherwise stated the project is neither endorsed by nor affiliated with any of the holders of any such rights and as such cannot grant any rights to use any otherwise protected materials. Your use of any such or similar incorporeal property is at your own risk.

Personality rights

The project may contain material which may portray an identifiable person who is alive or deceased recently. The use of images of living or recently deceased individuals is, in some jurisdictions, restricted by laws pertaining to personality rights, independent from their copyright status. Before using these types of content, please ensure that you have the right to use it under the laws which apply in the circumstances of your intended use. You are solely responsible for ensuring that you do not infringe someone else's personality rights.

Jurisdiction and legality of content

Publication of information found on pages of this project may be in violation of the laws of the country or jurisdiction from where you are viewing this information. The project database is stored on specific servers noted in About and is maintained in reference to the protections afforded under this jurisdiction. Laws in your country or jurisdiction may not protect or allow the same kinds of speech or distribution. The project does not encourage the violation of any laws; and cannot be responsible for any violations of such laws, should you link to this domain or use, reproduce, or republish the information contained herein.

The server providing this information is situated in Germany and under German jurisdiction. Information found here may be in violation of the laws of the jurisdiction from where you are viewing this information. We do not encourage the violation of laws and cannot be responsible for such violations.

If individual terms or sections of this statement are not legal or correct, the validity and content of the other parts remain uninfluenced by this fact.

Not professional advice

If you need specific advice (for example, medical, legal, financial, or risk management) please seek a professional who is licensed or knowledgeable in that area.

Links

Links or references pointing to documents outside of this area are for the convenience and information of visitors only. Those connected with the project have no influence on the content of linked or referenced documents and neither implied nor explicit consent to the contents to those documents on the Internet is hereby given.

Convention on Biological Diversity and CITES

Any disclosure of information will comply with the terms and spirit of the Convention on Biological Diversity. No information is disclosed which may threaten wild populations of organisms protected under CITES.

By using or contributing to this resource, in addition to agreeing to the copyright and licensing conditions, you also agree to the following privacy policy:

Content policies with respect to privacy and protection of minors

Information on this website may be suitable to identify living or dead persons. When authoring a contribution to this platform, authors must respect all legal requirements for privacy and must avoid unnecessary publication of private information. However, much of this platform will contain scientific and scientific customs will generally require citing the sources and authors of information, including collectors who have submitted their collections to public collections. Neither such citations, nor any citations by third parties of the contributors to information published on this platform, is considered a violation of privacy rights.

The protection of minors will be carefully observed. This website is not aware of carrying any information that is not suitable for minors. Please contact us should you detect such information; the information will be checked and any unsuitable materials will be removed as soon as possible.

The use of contact information contained on this web platform (users, imprint, or other addresses) for purposes of commercial advertisement is explicitly not permitted.

Privacy policies applicable when reading content

If you only read information or enter information to perform queries to access information, the only information collected about you is such as typically collected by websites in general. Your web browser will automatically transmit some information to the server (date, time, operating system, browser type and version, referrer, page viewed, and your IP address). Except for the IP address, this information cannot be traced to a person. The server will store this information, which will be used for statistical purposes and tracing error or problems with the service. The data will not be merged with other data sources and will not be shared with other parties, except as required by the law.

This web application will furthermore set temporary "cookies", small text information stored by your browser, and transmitted to the server. Please allow these cookies. The information will be used only for normal operation, e.g. to recognize signed-in users and user preferences. It will not be shared with others or otherwise used to infringe on your privacy. You can prevent your browser from using cookies; in this case, a number of functions of this website will not work.

Web site analysis: This website uses a web analysis service provided by Google Inc. (“Google Analytics”). This service also uses cookies to distinguish between new and returning visitors. In contrast to the server-internal statistics mentioned above, this analysis will, however, be performed on servers provided by Google. To avoid a violation of your privacy, your IP address will be abbreviated before being transmitted to Google (function “_anonymizeIp”). The web counter supports analyses on the number of visitors, their geographic origin, operating systems, browser type and version, screen resolutions and similar technical parameters. It also allows to analyze which pages are viewed most or least; however, it cannot analyze the pages used by specific users. Google itself will use the data exclusively for statistical purposes. Google will transfer the data to a third party only if legally obliged to do so, or if the third party is performing work for Google. The state-appointed data privacy agency of Hamburg, Germany, has analyzed the use of Google Analytics and agreed to the form used on this site. Should you still have reservations, you can install a browser plugin to completely disable Google Analytics in your browser.

Social networks: Some wikis may use social network plugin buttons provided by Facebook, Google, or Twitter. You can recognize these buttons by the following characteristics: The Facebook-button contains a white “f” on blue background and is accompanied by the text “Like”, “Recommend” or respective translations into other languages; the Google-Plus-button contains a blue “+1” on gray background and a red-green-yellow colored bar on top; the Twitter-button contain a light blue bird silhouette on blue background. When you open a page with these buttons your browser will open additional connections to the social networks. The content of the plugins will be delivered directly from the social networks and is not under the control of “Species-ID”. It is possible to block unwanted information transfer to social networks, for example using a “Facebook Blocker”.

Privacy policies applicable to content contributors

If you contribute works (text, images, other resources) to this collaboration platform, you are performing a publishing act. Your work, your authorship, and the time of publication will be recorded and made publicly available.

Although you may delete all or parts of your contribution from the current version of a page or record, your original contribution will normally still be present in a version history or record changelog. You do not reserve a right to delete information from these history mechanisms. This is comparable to writing articles or letters to the editor in a scientific journal; the publication of these works cannot simply be reversed. System administrators will, however, try to solve reasonable requests to hide public access to sensitive information, as long as no rights or other contributors are affected. System administrators have no rights to remove materials without an agreement with the author, unless this is in response to a legal requirement, a court order, or otherwise proven illegal or illicit content.

Creation of user accounts

Most contribution mechanisms available here require you to first create a user account. The following points apply to the creation of user accounts:

• Entering personal or business data is voluntarily. Such information may be used exclusively for educational and scientific purposes. Commercial use is not permitted.
• Name: Because of the importance of authorship to assess quality and validity of scientific contributions, we normally create only accounts under your real name. Only under special circumstances a pseudonym may be considered.
• Password: Users are encouraged to select strong passwords (more than 8 characters, words not found in dictionaries, ideally containing digits or punctuation). Do not share your password or publish it. We cannot guarantee that your password is safe against break-in with hacker tools, but we promise to make every effort to protect your password. Note that passwords are currently not protected against hackers listening on your local network (if you use http instead of https).
• Address: Parts of your address such as country and city may be publicly visible, especially if this is necessary to distinguish multiple persons of the same name.
  • If your personal information contains an affiliation with an organization, the organization name and address will be published.
  • We try to keep your private address confidential, except for the country and city you live in. However, other users of this collaboration platform, after authentication (= login), may be able to read such information to contact you directly. By submitting the information, you agree with this practice.
• Once created, user accounts cannot be removed upon your request. They are required to document the history of the contributed content.
• In some cases you may be able to update erroneous information yourself, in other cases a server administrator may have to do this for you.

See also:

• Privacy policy
• copyright and licensing conditions
• Contact