Extension of Proprietary Times

Due to the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on the global astronomical community, the ALMA Director has made the following decision regarding proprietary times of ALMA data sets.

The proprietary period of all MOUSs that have been delivered to principle investigators (PIs), but have not become public by 19 March 2020, will be extended by three months. This implies that the proprietary period of all these ALMA data will effectively be set to 15 months, or nine months for DDT projects. 19 March was the last day that ALMA was observing before Cycle 7 observations were suspended.

For data sets that already reached the end of the proprietary time between March 19 and today, the proprietary time will be reinstated and extended for an additional 3 months. Please be aware that ALMA cannot guarantee that these data sets have not already been downloaded by archive users.

PIs of data sets that do not fall in the category defined above, who feel that their ability to work on their data within the regular proprietary period is impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, are requested to submit a ticket to the “Proprietary Period Extension Requests” Department of the ALMA Helpdesk. ALMA will handle these requests in a fair and lenient manner as we are committed to support our users as much as possible during this stressful time.

Updates on this policy may be posted on the Science Portal in the future.