Sharing and Privacy

HydroShare provides you with the ability to have very granular control over who can acess your resources. You can keep your resources private, you can share your resources publicly for anyone to access, or you can share with individual HydroShare users or user groups. When you have finished your work and you are ready to formally publish your resource, HydroShare enables you to do so and will register a formal, citable digital object identifier (DOI) for your resource. 

In HydroShare, the following definitions apply to the "sharing status" of a resource:

Public - A "public" resource can be discovered by anyone, and anyone can access the files. The resource may not be final, may be subject to change, could be deleted, and is not considered to be published.

Discoverable- A "discoverable" resource can be discovered by anyone in HydroShare, but only users with permission can access the content files.

Published - A "published" resource is one that is finished and is formally published. Published resources receive formal DOIs and, when published users can no longer modify their content or metadata descriptions. Published resources can be discovered and accessed by the public.

Private- A "private" resource cannot be discovered by anyone except the user who created it. 

Similar to the above definitions, there is a difference between "sharing" a resource and "publishing" a resource in HydroShare:

Share: The act of giving another HydroShare user, user group, or the public the right to access the content and metadata description of a resource. "Shared" resources may still be private when shared only with individual users or groups.

Publish: The act of formally publishing a resource, which is very much like publishing a research paper. Once published, the resource can no longer be changed and has a permanent, citable DOI. Publishing a resource makes it accessible to the public.

The following topics are available to assist you with sharing and publishing your resources: