Contributor Terms

These terms apply to anyone who submits content to BarkMind — including case reports, annotations, behavioral tags, comments, expert resolutions, or consensus opinions. By submitting any content, you agree to these Contributor Terms.

You retain full ownership of the content you create. By submitting content to BarkMind, you grant the platform the following license:

Non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to: store and display your content on the platform; include your content in dataset exports; include your content in publicly released versions of the BarkMind behavioral dataset; and reference your content in publications, preprints, and research papers produced by or citing the BarkMind project.

This license does not transfer ownership. You may use your own contributions however you choose. BarkMind may not re-license your contributions to third parties for commercial purposes without separate agreement.

Attribution is permanent and irrevocable. Your username and credential status at the time of contribution are attached to every annotation you create. This attribution follows the data through all exports and publications.

If you prefer to be cited by a different name in publications (e.g., your full professional name rather than your username), contact us to register that preference before the dataset is released.

We cannot retroactively attribute contributions made under anonymous or pseudonymous usernames. Use a professional username that you want cited in research.

The BarkMind behavioral dataset — the aggregate of all evidence-locked case data, annotations, and expert resolutions — is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) unless otherwise noted.

CC BY 4.0 allows anyone to share and adapt the dataset for any purpose, including commercial use, provided they attribute the BarkMind project and individual contributors as specified in the dataset release documentation.

When a case is evidence-locked, all content associated with that case — case description, media, annotations, tags, expert resolution, and consensus record — is frozen. Locked content cannot be edited or deleted.

This is a core architectural guarantee of the platform. The immutability of locked cases is what makes the dataset scientifically reliable. By contributing to a case, you accept that your contribution may eventually be locked.

Expert contributors (those with verified credentials) have additional responsibilities:

• Expert resolutions and consensus opinions are formal professional statements
• Credentials listed on your profile must be current and genuine
• Resolutions should reflect your genuine professional assessment
• Manipulating the consensus system is grounds for credential revocation

Contributors who submit content before the first public dataset release (planned as v1.0) will receive a permanent “Founding Contributor” designation in the dataset acknowledgments. This designation is based on activity timestamp and cannot be revoked.

You may request removal of non-locked contributions at any time by contacting us. Locked contributions cannot be withdrawn. If your account is closed, your non-locked contributions may be anonymized or removed, but your locked contributions are retained with attribution (as this is a requirement of dataset integrity).

Contributor questions: [email protected]