Publishing by non-University members

There is an increasing requirement to allow for collaborative projects with users from other institutions. As such, they may be generating traffic or creating content which is then exported from Informatics systems, and for which Informatics would ultimately be responsible. The three ways to approach this are listed below.

1. Someone from within Informatics takes responsiblity for screening or moderating all content before it is published. In this case responsibility for the content passes to the moderator.

2. Other Edinburgh users can directly create externally-visible content. In this case audit trails must link back to their UUNs, and the Computing Regulations apply as normal.

3. External users can directly create externally-visible content. For this to be permissible they must first explicitly agree to the Computing Regulations. (It is likely that these users will already be subject to some form of local equivalent to our Computing Regulations, but that does not remove the requirement for them to agree to the Edinburgh regulations.) Currently, this can be done by having them request an iFriend account, to which audit trails should be linked back. It is likely that the iFriend service will be withdrawn at some point, in which case some other means of recording an external users agreement to the Edinburgh computing regulations will be necessary. This may as simple as having the external user sign and return a paper copy of the regulations.
   

In any case, it is necessary that there be a local Responsible Person who can respond quickly to "take down" requests and other notifications, in line with the University's published policies.

It is higly desirable, of course, that any system which publishes externally should have a robust audit-trail mechanism, so that any problematic content can be clearly and unambiguously linked with its creator. This applies whether content authors are local Informatics users or external users.