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6. Common Scenarios

The following scenarios are provided to clarify how access control operates in practice. They are intended to assist corpus collectors, IRBs, archives, and legal departments in anticipating and resolving access-related situations.

Scenario A — A third party requests raw audio directly from a custodian

Situation: An external researcher contacts a custodian stating: "I understand you have access to Corpus X. Could you share a sample of the audio with me?"

[!CAUTION] The custodian must decline and direct the researcher to the corpus collector directly and/or to the relevant scientific archive's access request procedure.

Situation: An ethics board contacts a custodian requesting consent forms or IRB approvals for one or more datasets in the consortium.

[!CAUTION] The custodian must explain that access was gained via the relevant scientific archive. All legal and ethical documentation — including consent forms and IRB approvals — is held by the corpus collector and/or archive, not by the custodians. The custodian's access to the data does not make them the legal or ethical responsible party for that data.

Scenario C — Insufficient space for all citations

Situation: A custodian is submitting a paper to a conference which limits the number of citations to 10. It is therefore impossible to cite all datasets and the three archives.

[!NOTE] The custodian should cite the three archives in the main reference list and have an additional reference list including all dataset citations. The custodian should also email the corpus collectors so that they are aware of this unusual situation and don't discover it later on.