Data Contributor Terms
Effective date: 2026-08-17.
By uploading a dataset to NEMAR (Neuroelectromagnetic Data Archive and Tools Resource), you make the following warranties. They exist to protect research participants and to keep NEMAR datasets shareable worldwide. These terms are comparable to those of OpenNeuro, with differences noted below.
Ownership, license, and ethics approval
Section titled “Ownership, license, and ethics approval”You warrant that one of the following applies to your deposit:
- Owner deposit. You are the owner of the dataset or authorized by the owner to deposit it, and you hold all ethics permissions required to share the data publicly, such as Institutional Review Board (IRB) or ethics committee approval and participant consent covering public sharing.
- Licensed redistribution. You are not the owner, but the dataset was publicly released under a license that permits redistribution, and your deposit complies with that license, including attribution and any share-alike or non-commercial conditions. The original release carries the ethics permissions; you warrant that you have not altered the data in any way that would undermine its de-identification.
For licensed redistribution, you must additionally affirm that the dataset is not already available on NEMAR or on any upstream archive, such as OpenNeuro, in Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) format. This prevents duplicate archival copies of the same dataset, which would split citations and create conflicting versions of record. If the dataset exists upstream in another format, state the upstream source in the dataset description so the provenance is clear.
De-identification
Section titled “De-identification”You warrant that the dataset contains no identifiable personal information, including the identifiers enumerated by the United States Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Safe Harbor standard: no names, addresses, dates of birth, acquisition dates finer than year, contact details, record numbers, or facial imagery (anatomical images must be defaced), and no rare-attribute combinations that make a participant recognizable. Vendor file headers must be scrubbed of identifying fields.
The re-identification key
Section titled “The re-identification key”Research datasets are coded: participants appear as subject labels such as sub-01.
Somewhere, a key may link those labels to identities.
When you deposit, you must declare which of the following applies,
and the declaration is recorded with the dataset:
- Key destroyed. The key linking subject codes to identities has been destroyed. The dataset is anonymous in the strict sense of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
- Key retained by depositor. The key exists but remains with your institution under its ethics protocol, and is never transmitted to NEMAR. The dataset is pseudonymous for you, and your institution remains responsible for it under applicable data protection law.
In either case, you warrant that no re-identification key, in any form, is ever uploaded to or shared with NEMAR.
This differs from OpenNeuro, which requires key destruction in all cases. NEMAR accepts retained keys to support longitudinal studies, but the responsibility that comes with retention stays with you. See the GDPR Position Statement for the legal consequences of each choice.
Depositors in the European Union
Section titled “Depositors in the European Union”If your data was collected in the European Union or European Economic Area, you warrant that your legal basis (typically the explicit informed consent of your participants) permits deposit in a publicly accessible archive hosted in the United States. The Open Brain Consent GDPR edition provides vetted consent language designed for exactly this purpose, and we recommend it for prospective studies.
Licensing
Section titled “Licensing”You choose the license for your dataset, subject to one floor: the data must be freely available for nonprofit research use, without registration walls, per-use consent forms, or fees. Licenses permitting only non-commercial use are acceptable. We recommend Creative Commons CC0 or CC BY 4.0 for maximum reuse, but they are not required. The chosen license is recorded in the dataset metadata and its Digital Object Identifier (DOI) record.
This differs from OpenNeuro, which requires CC0 for all datasets after a limited grace period.
Removal
Section titled “Removal”If a dataset is later found to contain identifiable information or to have been deposited without adequate permissions, it is handled under the Takedown Procedure. You agree to cooperate with such a review for datasets you deposited.