The following protocols were generally agreed by the participants of the BEDMAP consortium as providing adequate safeguards for data-collectors, whilst allowing other BEDMAP partners and, eventually, the wider community the opportunity to use BEDMAP data for research purposes. The guidelines adopted would be broadly similar to those adopted by the ADMAP consortium for magnetic anomaly data (ADMAP, 1995) -

1. At least until the next BEDMAP workshop any data deposited with the BEDMAP data managers would be considered to be for the sole use of BEDMAP and would not be released to any third party for other purposes.

2. All gridded datasets and contour maps produced by BEDMAP will be freely available to all bone fide researchers

3. Certain restrictions will apply for access to the individual measurements of ice thickness deposited with BEDMAP. For 3 years after collection data are considered to be the sole property of the originators. For the subsequent 3 years the data will be made available for use by other BEDMAP researchers, provided that this transfer is considered as a collaboration between the originator and recipient, and authorship of resulting publications should acknowledge that collaboration.

4. For existing datasets the same restrictions will apply but with the date of publication of this report being considered as the beginning of the process.

5. A companion paper will be prepared as an accompaniment to the final bed elevation map. This will be published with an authorship reflecting the entire BEDMAP consortium.

6. The copyright of the final product of BEDMAP will be vested with SCAR.

Data quality:

While the digital models have a nominal spatial resolution of 5 km, such high resolution is not strictly justified by the original data density over all parts of the ice sheet.