DIGITAL POROUS MEDIA PORTAL POLICY, DATA AND SOFTWARE USAGE AGREEMENT

This Policy and Data Usage Agreement (the “Agreement”) is between The University of Texas at Austin (“University”), where Digital Porous Media Portal (formerly Digital Rocks Portal) is hosted, a component institution of The University of Texas System (“System”), an agency of the State of Texas, and any User of the Digital Porous Media Portal.

  1. The Digital Porous Media Portal. The Digital Porous Media Portal (DPMP) (formerly Digital Rocks Portal, UT Tech ID 7007 PRO) is an open data repository to organize and preserve images and related experimental measurements of different porous materials. In addition, portal hosts Applications on High Performance Computing (HPC) resources of Texas Advanced Computing Center that can be used to analyze, visualize and simulate with the data uploaded to the portal. Using data available at or uploading data to the DPMP, as well as using software Applications through the Portal, requires agreeing to the terms and conditions of this Agreement.

    Data at the DPMP is stored in a High Performance Storage resource at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (“TACC”) that has built in redundancy and is continuously monitored for security and failure. On a daily basis the data is replicated so that in the event that one system fails the data can be recovered. For information, see https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/systems/corral.

    The DPMP has multiple protocols and tools in place to upload data. Remote Users may experience difficulties uploading very large datasets and may contact the data curator for assistance. The DPMP will use best efforts to address questions and issues promptly.

  2. Using the Portal and Data Curation. User uploading the data agrees to present a clear, organized, well described, and reusable dataset to the DPMP. The DPMP is designed to facilitate this process by providing tools to help users organize, describe, present and access the data. The DPMP provides image services to render raw/binary data into viewable formats. It allows conducting basic image analysis such as visualization and histograms

    The DPMP requires metadata in order to achieve an adequate description of the dataset and some metadata is required for the images to render correctly. Uploading users are expected to describe porous imaging data using the information elements identified in the data model that purpose. The data model has been developed considering community best practices. Users that do not meet DPMP standards in describing their data will receive warnings as they enter data , Once the project is public, users will not be able to directly edit the metadata in their projects; such updates must be sent, with any needed explanatory material, to the portal's data curator

  3. Data Privacy and Publication. Users may store, organize and describe their data privately in the DPMP workspace for a period of time until they are ready to share it publicly. The private storage option is intended to keep objects out of the public view for a limited period. However, because the DPMP is an open repository, there is a limit of one year from the date of this Agreement during which a User may keep its data private. After the time elapses Users will receive a notice that the private period is ending. Upon receiving such notice, User will have 60 days to publish its data or remove the data from the DPMP repository. If no response if received within 60 days, data will be automatically removed from the DPMP.

    Dataset review. When a user requests publication, data curators will proceed to review the project data for accuracy. Materials submitted in a format unsupported by the DPMP, or without sufficient attribution and metadata, will not be made public by the DPMP until corrections to the data have been submitted. The data curators will do their best to initiate the review process within one month of the publication request submission and the author can follow up if that is not case, and the project publication time frame will depend on the response to the curation requests.

    The DPMP uses the DataCite metadata schema, for basic author and data description for purposes of citing data in conjunction with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

    When the data has been uploaded and described to DPMP standards, DOIs will be assigned upon the publication request of the project lead. A DOI is a type of persistent identifier that will be managed over time, allowing the digital object to be persistently referenced, as the identifier will not change even if the item is moved to another repository. DOIs allow your data to be cited by others and are useful to link data to a publication. If an upload involves data that has been published elsewhere and or has an existing DOI, project leads have the opportunity to reference those data sets using the External URL box or Related Publications page. The existing DOI and/or a link can be added to the data set information.

    Once the data is published neither the DOI cannot be deleted and the dataset is available publicly. Presently there is no versioning for issuing corrections. If users need to publish a data set derived from an existing one, they can publish a new dataset and relate them via related publications.

    If a user wishes to remove published dataset from the public view, this has to be justified and the process is as follows. Upon publication data creators can request to remove their data from the repository. To do so, a User must contact the repository curator and provide a justification. A record stating that the dataset was available and including an abstract and an explanation about why the data was removed will be in place. It has to be reminded that the dataset will have a DOI and that DOI will remain active so that when people use it from a citation they can verify that the data is no longer there.

    The DPMP is committed to help preserve your data for the long term. If for unforeseen reasons the DPMP has to cease services, the DPMP will make arrangements, free of charge, to transfer the data to another long-term repository with DOI permanence. In turn, a copy of the data will be preserved at the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s tape archive. Users will be notified of changes and of location of their data with enough time so they can retrieve it along with the metadata.

    To analyze data from DPMP users can use TACC computational resources Industry users are referred to https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/partnerships/industry and academic, non-University of Texas at Austin users are referred to https://portal.xsede.org/#/guest. University of Texas at Austin users can create an account on https://portal.tacc.utexas.edu/.

  4. Storage and maintenance fee. We will not mandate any fees for publishing or downloading the datasets from DPMP until August 31, 2026 as we are in beta testing of the new portal functionality. In August 2026, we will resume charging the publication fees. Public dataset on DPMP are open data and free for download for anyone. We invite, however, community to support the portal functionality with suggested donations as follows.

    4.1. Suggested individual donation for users with private or published projects

    Project Size Less than 2GB 2–500 GB 500GB–1TB
    Suggested Donation Free $1,500 $3,000

    4.2. Institutional support donation (annual, at least for three years) for users with private or published projects

    Institutions (universities, companies, departments etc.) can pay a yearly fee and can have any number of members. The project is affiliated with an institution if the primary project author belongs to the institution. The fee is calculated/assessed based on the data size in all affiliated projects (published or private) at the time of establishing institutional membership and re-assessed yearly thereafter. In this case, the individual project-based fee above is waived and the fees are assessed per table below instead.

    Institution Less than 500GB 500GB–1TB 1–3TB
    Academic/non-profit $5,000 $7,500 $10,000
    Company/private $7,500 $10,000 $12,500

    Companies that are part of the Digital Rock Petrophysics IAP (PI Prodanovic) at UT Austin are automatically institutional members of Digital Porous Media Portal for the years they pay the IAP membership fee.

    4.3. Data enthusiast donation for users with no stored data (annual)

    If you would like to be foundational supporter of DPMP (and get benefits of data access outline in Section 4.5), but have no projects of the size that incurs a fee, please consider annual membership as follows:

    Institution Data Enthusiast
    Individual $500
    Academic/non-profit $2,000
    Company/private $3,000

  5. Storage Limits. Limits on amount of storage space per project are as set by the DPMP. For the time being, we assume the limit of 3TB and encourage users to discuss the storage limit with Dr. Prodanovic.

  6. Data Licenses. The DPMP is an open data repository and recommends that all data be accompanied by license terms so that potential users know under what conditions posted data may be reused. The default license selection is the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) which indicates to the users that they can freely share, modify and use the data provided that they cite the authors and that they license derivatives under the same terms and conditions of this license. Contributing users who wish to designate another license appropriate for an open repository need to send that request to the data curator.

  7. Digital Porous Media Tools is a growing collection of Python tools for image analysis of porous media. Many of the software tools are integrated into the Jupyter Notebook Application in Digital Porous Media Portal, but are also published as a standalone open source software.

  8. Disclaimers. THE SERVICES OF THE DIGITAL POROUS MEDIA PORTAL AND DATA ARE PROVIDED “AS IS.” NO WARRANTIES OR REPRESENTATIONS ARE MADE RELATING TO THE DPMP OR ANY DOCUMENTATION, AND UNIVERSITY EXPRESSLY EXCLUDES THE WARRANTY OF NON-INFRINGEMENT OF THIRD-PARTY RIGHTS, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR MERCHANTABILITY. NO WARRANTY IS PROVIDED THAT THE PORTAL OR ANY DATA WILL SATISFY ANY REQUIREMENTS, THAT THE DPR OR ANY OF THE DATA IS WITHOUT DEFECT OR ERROR OR THAT OPERATION OF THE DPR WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED.

    UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHALL THE DPMP, UNIVERSITY, SYSTEM, OR ANY OF THEIR PARENTS, AFFILIATES, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, OR AGENTS BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING FROM OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OF OR ANY INABILITY TO USE THE SITE OR THE PROJECTS, OR ANY CONTENT CONTAINED ON THE DPMP, OR ANY UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS OR USE OF DATA IN THE DPMP.

    Users employ the published data at their own risk. The portal does not guarantee that the data is free from error. Moreover, the downloader has no knowledge of and will not be responsible for any inaccuracies and any other problems or inaccuracies in the content of the data and the accompanying citation information.

  9. Indemnification. User agrees to indemnify and hold harmless System, University, their Regents, officers, agents and employees from and against any claims, demands, or causes of action whatsoever relating to this Agreement, including without limitation those arising on account of any use of the DPMP.

  10. Governing Law, Jurisdiction and Venue. This Agreement shall be construed in accordance with and all disputes hereunder shall be governed by the laws of the State of Texas as applied to transactions taking place wholly within Texas between Texas residents. The Texas state courts of Travis County, Texas (or, if there is exclusive federal jurisdiction, the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, Austin Division) shall have exclusive jurisdiction and venue over any dispute arising out of the Agreement, and User hereby consents to the jurisdiction of such courts.

  11. Agreement and Policy Subject to Change. The imaging technology, database management, business model, and characteristics of the DPMP are continually improving, thus details of this agreement and policy are subject to revision every twelve months.

  12. Citation and Acknowledgement. Users must acknowledge the use of DPMP data when publicly presenting any findings that benefited from their use of public DPMP data. Such presentations include but are not limited to papers, books, book chapters, conference posters, and talks. When publishing findings that benefit from public DPMP data, please include the following citation:

Masa Prodanovic, Maria Esteva, Matthew Hanlon, Gaurav Nanda, Prateek Agarwal (2015) Digital Rocks Portal: a repository for porous media images http://dx.doi.org/10.17612/P7CC7K

which specifically refers to the Portal, as well as using any dataset specific DOI.