PLEASE READ THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE HESTIA PLATFORM
These terms tell you the rules for using the Harmonised Environmental Storage and Tracking of the Impacts of Agriculture ( "HESTIA" ) platform.
The HESTIA platform is a site operated by the Chancellor Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford whose administrative offices are at Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JD (the "University").
To contact us, please email community@hestia.earth .
By using the HESTIA platform, you confirm that you accept these terms of use and that you agree to comply with them.
If you do not agree to these terms, you must not use the HESTIA platform.
These terms of use refer to the following additional terms, which also apply to your use of the HESTIA platform:
We amend these terms from time to time. Every time you wish to use the HESTIA platform, please check these terms to ensure you understand the terms that apply at that time.
We may update and change the HESTIA platform from time to time.
The HESTIA platform is made available free of charge.
We do not guarantee that the HESTIA platform, or any content on it, will always be available or be uninterrupted. We may suspend or withdraw or restrict the availability of all or any part of the HESTIA platform for business and operational reasons. We will try to give you reasonable notice of any suspension or withdrawal.
You are also responsible for ensuring that all persons who access the HESTIA platform through your internet connection are aware of these terms of use and other applicable terms and conditions, and that they comply with them.
We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another organisation. We will always tell you in writing if this happens and we will ensure that the transfer will not affect your rights under the contract.
If you choose, or you are provided with, a user identification code, password or any other piece of information as part of our security procedures, you must treat such information as confidential. You must not disclose it to any third party.
We have the right to disable any user identification code or password, whether chosen by you or allocated by us, at any time, if in our reasonable opinion you have failed to comply with any of the provisions of these terms of use.
If you know or suspect that anyone other than you knows your user identification code or password, you must promptly notify us at community@hestia.earth .
We will only use your personal information as set out in our Privacy Policy .
The intellectual property rights in the materials on the HESTIA platform are either owned by us, owned by third parties who have granted us the right to use those materials, or made available on our platform subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. We will indicate the original source of any materials not owned by us and recommend you check the respective terms of use before further use.
If you print off, copy, download, share or repost any part of the HESTIA platform in breach of these terms of use, your right to use the HESTIA platform will cease immediately and you must, at our option, return or destroy any copies of the materials you have made.
Other than as expressly provided for by the HESTIA API, you shall not conduct, facilitate, authorise or permit any text or data mining or web scraping in relation to the HESTIA platform or any services provided via, or in relation to, the HESTIA platform. This includes using (or permitting, authorising, or attempting the use of):
The provisions in this clause should be treated as an express reservation of our rights in this regard, including for the purposes of Article 4(3) of Digital Copyright Directive ((EU) 2019/790).
This clause shall not apply insofar as (but only to the extent that) we are unable to exclude or limit text or data mining or web scraping activity by contract under the laws which are applicable to us.
You may not use the HESTIA platform:
You also agree:
The content on the HESTIA platform is provided for general information only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on the HESTIA platform.
Although we make reasonable efforts to update the information on the HESTIA platform, we make no representations, warranties or guarantees, whether express or implied, that the content on the HESTIA platform is accurate, complete, or up to date.
Where the HESTIA platform contains links to other sites and resources provided by third parties, these links are provided for your information only. Such links should not be interpreted as approval by us of those linked websites or information you may obtain from them.
We have no control over the contents of those sites or resources.
This website may include information and materials uploaded by other users of the site. This information and these materials may not have been verified or approved by us. The views expressed by other users on the HESTIA platform may not represent our views or values and we do not endorse them.
If you wish to complain about any content or material on the HESTIA platform, please contact us on community@hestia.earth .
These content standards apply to any and all material which you contribute to the HESTIA platform ( Contribution ).
The Content Standards must be complied with in spirit as well as to the letter. The standards apply to each part of any Contribution as well as to its whole.
The University will determine, in its discretion, whether a Contribution breaches the Content Standards.
A Contribution must:
A Contribution must not:
When we consider that a breach of the content standards has occurred, we may take such action as we deem appropriate.
Failure to comply with the content standards constitutes a material breach of the terms of use upon which you are permitted to use the HESTIA platform, and may result in the immediate, temporary or permanent removal of any Contribution uploaded by you to the HESTIA platform.
Whenever you make use of a feature that allows you to upload content to the HESTIA platform, or to make contact with other users of the HESTIA platform, you must comply with our content standards, as set out above.
You warrant that any Contribution does comply with those standards, and you will be liable to us and indemnify us for any breach of that warranty. This means you will be responsible for any loss or damage we suffer as a result of your breach of warranty.
Any content you upload to the HESTIA platform will be considered non-confidential and non-proprietary. You retain all of your ownership rights in your content, but you are required to grant us and other users of the HESTIA platform a licence to use, store, and copy that content and to distribute and make it available to third parties. The rights you license to us are described in Rights you are giving us to use material you upload below.
We also have the right to disclose your identity to any third party who is claiming that any content posted or uploaded by you to the HESTIA platform constitutes a violation of their intellectual property rights or of their right to privacy.
We have the right to remove any posting you make on the HESTIA platform if, in our opinion, your post does not comply with our content standards. If you wish to contact us in relation to content you have uploaded to the HESTIA platform and that we have taken down, please contact community@hestia.earth .
You are solely responsible for securing and backing up your content.
We provide an option to make your data private by setting dataPrivate to true in each node. This means that HESTIA administrators can access the data in the node and you can grant access to the data to other platform users, but the data will not be made available to any other users of the platform or distributed to third parties. You can email us at community@hestia.earth to request a list of HESTIA administrators.
We also make available a version of HESTIA, the HESTIA Community Edition which you can host on your own servers. It allows you to manage your own privacy settings, and may be a more suitable option if you are working with data that you do not wish to become publicly available.
Our vision is that data on the sustainability and productivity of food, particularly research data, is made as widely available and re-useable as possible. When you upload or post content to the HESTIA platform, you are therefore agreeing to grant us the right to make your Contribution available to the public under a Creative Commons International (CC BY 4.0) licence. This includes the following rights:
If your copyright protected work was posted on HESTIA without your authorisation, please email community@hestia.earth to request its removal. Before doing this, please consider the exceptions to copyright such as fair dealing and exceptions for non-commercial research.
We do not guarantee that the HESTIA platform will be secure or free from bugs or viruses.
You are responsible for configuring your information technology, computer programmes and platform to access the HESTIA platform. You should use your own virus protection software.
You must not misuse the HESTIA platform by knowingly introducing viruses, trojans, worms, logic bombs or other material that is malicious or technologically harmful. You must not attempt to gain unauthorised access to the HESTIA platform, the server on which the HESTIA platform is stored, or any server, computer or database connected to the HESTIA platform. You must not attack the HESTIA platform via a denial-of-service attack or a distributed denial-of service attack. By breaching this provision, you would commit a criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. We will report any such breach to the relevant law enforcement authorities and we will co-operate with those authorities by disclosing your identity to them. In the event of such a breach, your right to use the HESTIA platform will cease immediately.
You may link to our home page, provided you do so in a way that is fair and legal and does not damage our reputation or take advantage of it.
You must not establish a link in such a way as to suggest any form of association, approval or endorsement on our part where none exists.
You must not establish a link to the HESTIA platform in any website that is not owned by you.
We reserve the right to withdraw linking permission without notice.
If you wish to link to or make any use of content on the HESTIA platform other than that set out above, please contact community@hestia.earth .
These terms of use, their subject matter, and their formation, are governed by English law. We both agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.
Last edited on 14 Apr 2023.