Fair Use Policy of ORCHIDEE

Staying at the forefront of land surface modelling requires the ORCHIDEE team to continuously invest in improving, developing, implementing and parameterizing biogeochemical, physical and anthropogenic processes in the ORCHIDEE code. Similarly, the ORCHIDEE team invests in creating and maintaining up-to-date driver files, support and training as well as an easy-to-use run environment (libIGCM). The model code, drivers and run environment are called the ORCHIDEE environment. These activities come with a significant investment of time for coding, debugging and evaluating the impacts of these developments on the overall performance of the model.

The fair use policy for the ORCHIDEE environment aims at fostering the access of the ORCHIDEE community to new developments, while recognize the intellectual contribution of the individuals who contributed to the ORCHIDEE environment. Recognition of intellectual contributions to the ORCHIDEE environment will be ensured by:

• Offering co-authorship on any publication that benefits of recent improvements in the ORCHIDEE environment. We deliberately refrain from specifying 'recent' as it should be function of the intellectual contribution and the exposure this contribution already received.

• Discussing, early on, intended usage of recent improvements in the ORCHIDEE environment. This discussion should prevent uses and/or applications of the ORCHIDEE environment which are in conflict with the plans of the main contributor.

• The main contributor to the ORCHIDEE environment lists his/her intended usage of his/her recent improvements in the ORCHIDEE environment (see Section “Intended studies”).

The fair use policy is designed as a win-win opportunity for both users and developers of the ORCHIDEE environment. The developer will have time to contribute new and original aspects to the ORCHIDEE environment, with less stress associated to possible delays in publications. The users will be able to make use of an improved ORCHIDEE environment allowing him/her to design original simulation-experiments, test new ideas and further developed new functionalities based on those they inherit. They will in addition benefit from the developer's expertise on the model and will receive help with the interpretation.

Adhering to the fair use policy of ORCHIDEE warrants the continuation of ambitious model developments and thus contributes to safeguarding our leadership in land surface modelling.