2. How does the ExELang Consortium work?¶
2.1 Design and Governance¶
The ExELang Consortium was designed by the ExELang team, with the basic set of rights and responsibilities drafted and shared among relevant parties. No explicit governance structure has been put in place. Should changes be made in the future (e.g., including additional custodians and/or corpus collectors; changing rights and responsibilities), changes will be proposed by the custodians and communicated to all corpus collectors via the consortium mailing list before being adopted. To facilitate communication, two mailing lists have been created:
- exelangc-custodians — to contact the custodians directly: [exelangc-custodians@googlegroups.com]
- exelangc-all — includes all corpus collectors and custodians: [exelangc-all@googlegroups.com]
2.2 The ExELang Consortium builds on Extant Archives¶
All data shared through the ExELang Consortium must be deposited in one of three recognized scientific archives: HomeBank, Databrary, or The Language Archive. These archives provide the legal and ethical framework governing all data access.
| Archive | Corpus collectors | Custodians |
|---|---|---|
| HomeBank | Contributor instructions | Membership |
| Databrary | Terms of use (esp. §8), Annex III | Terms of use (esp. §8, §9, §11), Annex III |
| The Language Archive | Policy, User guide (esp. §3.1) | Policy, User guide (esp. §3.1) |
In addition to depositing the data, corpus collectors need to grant the custodians access to their dataset through the relevant archive. In the case of The Language Archive, corpus collectors also need to manually add custodians' supervisees. For the other two archives, the custodians themselves declare the supervisees to the archive.
[!NOTE] For IRBs and legal departments: The ExELang Consortium does not create a new legal basis for data access. Access rights are entirely governed by the corpus collector's existing IRB, their agreement with the relevant scientific archive, and the archive's access policies. The Consortium only further specifies the permissible scope of use for data already accessible under those archive policies, and serves to clarify rights and responsibilities of the parties.
How to join each archive¶
HomeBank¶
To join HomeBank, a corpus collector must contact the HomeBank steering committee to deposit their dataset(s) and join the consortium.
Databrary¶
To join Databrary, a corpus collector must:
- Create a volume to deposit their dataset(s).
- Give access to Sho TSUJI, Okko RÄSÄNEN, and Marvin LAVECHIN.
The Language Archive (TLA)¶
To join TLA, a corpus collector must:
- Deposit their dataset(s) following the deposit instructions.
- Sign the deposit agreement shared by TLA.
- Inform TLA that you wish to grant access to Sho TSUJI (stsuji@ens.psl.eu), Okko RÄSÄNEN (okko.rasanen@tuni.fi), and Marvin LAVECHIN.