1. The support provided through NERC and the appropriate node must be acknowledged in all relevant publications (e.g. “The laboratory work was supported by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Environmental Omics Facility”). The correct acronym is ‘NEOF’, without dots.

2. The contributions from NEOF staff should be appropriately acknowledged. When appropriate, this should take the form of co-authorship, and first authorship by NEOF staff may sometimes be appropriate (e.g. in the case of technical papers). Authors that have generated results as visitors should include the appropriate Facility address  in their authorship affiliation.

3. Publication is the primary indicator of science supported by the NEOF and therefore an important means by which the value of the Facility to the scientific community is judged. Investigators on a NEOF-supported project are required to supply bibliographic references and/or copies of any publications (including PhD theses, posters and non-refereed publications) that discuss, describe, or are otherwise dependent on the results achieved at a NEOF node. Progress reports, in the form of requests for outputs and participation in a survey of users, should be provided when requested (usually annually), and usually after completion of the project. Confidential copies of more detailed results, arising from experiments conducted with the support of the Facility, must be shared with the Facility when requested and in a detailed report together with fully annotated datasets or files on completion of the work at the Facility.

4. If the investigator fails to provide reports as described in (3) the following sanctions will be implemented:

• no further applications to the NEOF will be accepted
• the failure to provide a report will be logged with NERC.

5. Completed drafts of all publications arising from work at the Facility must be provided to the respective senior NEOF staff who have supervised, assisted or undertaken to the work for comments AT LEAST 10 WORKING DAYS before submission for publication, to allow any necessary input to be made and to ensure that the methods used and the results obtained at the Facility are reported accurately and correctly.

6. To conform with NERC data policy requirements, and to conform with FAIR principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability), all omic data generated should be submitted to the appropriate international database (e.g. ENA, PRIDE, MetaboLights) as soon as possible or on completion of work done at NEOF. Submitted data may be made confidential initially, but should be made public within 18 months or when published, if this is sooner. NEOF may submit data on the user’s behalf and make them public after 18 months.

7. NERC expects users to make every effort to publish data obtained via NEOF within a reasonable time. If the user has not made reasonable efforts to publish data (such as genotype or omic data) or make materials (e.g. primers, clones, etc) available within 18 months, then the Facility may make them available to the scientific community.

8. Council accepts no responsibility or liability for materials submitted for analysis.