Contribution Terms of Service

You are being asked to contribute your recollections (for example, in the form of a story, image, or audiovisual recording) to the Covid-19 Reflections at Rice University web archives (Co-19-R), which is developing a permanent digital record of the events surrounding the pandemic's effect on the Rice community. Your participation in this project will allow future historians, and people such as yourself, to gain a greater understanding of this event and the responses to it.

You may not directly benefit from this research; however, we hope that your participation in the study may allow participants to gain some therapeutic benefits from sharing their stories as well as the satisfaction of contributing to a community digital archive. Future researchers using this archive will gain insights into specific experiences of the pandemic, allowing a broader understanding of this unprecedented time.

By submitting a contribution, you grant the Covid-19 Reflections at Rice University web archives a nonexclusive license to make your item publicly available on the Co-19-R website (with or without your name, depending on what you have indicated). Materials in the Co-19-R will be preserved for the long term.

You must be 18 years of age or older to submit material to us. Your submission of material constitutes your permission for, and consent to, the Co-19-R, its members and others acting under the Co-19-R's permission or authority, to use, copy, sublicense, modify, transmit, publicly perform, display, and create derivative works of your material in connection with the Co-19-R, in all media, whether now known or hereafter devised in perpetuity and without payment and without further notice to you.  The material you submit must have been created by you, wholly original, and shall not be copied from or based, in whole or in part, upon any other photographic, literary, or creative material, except to the extent that such material is in the public domain or is openly licensed (such as under certain Creative Commons licenses). Further, submitted material must not violate any confidentiality, privacy, security or other laws.

By submitting material to the Co-19-R, you release, discharge, and agree to be liable for, and hold harmless the Co-19-R, its members and persons acting under its permission or authority, including a public library or archive to which the collection might be donated for purposes of long-term preservation, for and from, any claims or liability arising out the Cov-19-R's use of the material, including, without limitation, claims for violation of privacy, defamation, or misrepresentation. This release of liability extends to Cov-19-R’s liability if any private information attached to an item is released to the public. If you are concerned about exposing private data embedded in image files by some cameras and photography software, we suggest wiping the EXIF data from contributed images using an online resource such as Verexif before you upload an image to this site.

We believe there are no known risks associated with this research study; however, as with any online related activity the risk of a breach of confidentiality is always possible.  To the best of our ability your contirbutions will remain confidential if you choose to participate anonymously.  We will minimize any risks by using a contribution method which is set to not require emails, IP addresses, or other identifying information for anonymous contributions.

Contributors are allowed to provide their emails at the time of contribution but are not required to do so. If you provide an email, a Guest User account will be created for you so that you can access all of your past contributions. Your email will not be shared with or sold to any third-party. The Cov-19-R will only use your email for the purpose of establishing an account and contacting you in case an issue arises with your contribution.

The Cov-19-R is a moderated collection, and submissions will be reviewed before being released on the public website. The Cov-19-R has no obligation to use your material.  The Cov-19-R reserves the right to modify, expand, and otherwise edit the metadata, description, and descriptive information supplied by the user for the purposes of curating the collection and making the item easily accessible.

Online participants will not receive any payment or other compensation for participating in this study. Once in-person research interviews can be conducted, interviewees may be compensated with a $10 gift card for a coffee shop.

Your participation in this study is completely voluntary and you can withdraw at any time.  You are free to skip any question or contribution of materials that you choose.

By agreeing to the Terms of Use and submitting material to the Cov-19-R, you are certifying that you have full rights, or have obtained permission, for the publication of this item and the information you provide about it. Should someone request that an item be removed from the website, the request will be reviewed and the item may be taken down.

We cannot return any material you submit to us so be sure to keep a copy.

You retain ownership of and copyright in the material you share, but contributing it here allows others to re-use it by assigning a Creative Commons license. By default, Creative Commons licenses require that your work is cited and attributed. All items contributed are made under the understanding that everything on this site follows a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)  For more information, please visit https://creativecommons.org/.

As researchers we are not qualified to provide counseling services and we will not be following up with you after this contribtution. If you feel upset after participating, or find that some questions or aspects of the project triggered distress, talking with a qualified clinician may help.  If students would like to talk with someone, support is available to students through campus mental health services by calling the Wellbeing and Counseling Center at 713-348-3311.

Rice employees may contact a UT-EAP Consultant at 713-500-3327, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In the case of an emergency please call 911.

If you have questions about this project or if you have a research-related problem, you may contact the Principal Investigator, Amanda Focke, Head of Special Collections / Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, afocke@rice.edu, 713-348-2124.

For questions about your rights as a research participant, or to discuss problems, concerns or suggestions related to the research, or to obtain information or offer input about the research, contact if you have questions pertaining to your rights as a research participant; or to report objections to this study, you should contact Joanna Espinosa, Compliance Administrator, at Rice University. Email: irb@rice.edu or Telephone: 713-348-3586.

By continuing with the contribution, you are indicating that you are at least 18 years old, have read and understood this consent form and agree to participate in this research study.  Please print a copy of this page for your records.

(Terms adapted from the Harvey Memories Project, Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, September 11 Digital Archive and Our Marathon)