measurement.network has been build to provide services for the good of the Internet, supporting research from academics and other public-good oriented projects. It is inherently non-commercial / not-for-profit. For that, it is supported with resources and time by various community members, and received funding from the RIPE Community Projects Fund.

As such, when you apply for and later use resources provided by the project, you need to commit to the following principles. Non-compliance with these principles will lead to the withdrawal of allocated and denial of future resources. To adapt a phrase from the MOTD of irc.belwue.de: “Use of resources on measurement.network is a privilege, not a right.”

If you are looking for the submission instructions, you can find them here.

Open Science & Open Data

We expect the results of your research to be publicly available, free of charge. This means that you will need to:

• Ensure that your paper is available ‘Open Access’, meaning without any paywall. This can also be accomplished by sharing an author copy on arxiv.org or an institutional website.
• Ensure that all code to create and analyze the measurement results is publicly available. Ideally, you do this via a) a public git repository and b) additionally an upload of a code-snapshot in a long-term artifact storage archive. This is to protect the code you used against, e.g., a researcher losing access to their account under which the git repository is hosted.
• Ensure that all data created in the measurements is publicly available via a long-term artifact storage archive. If data contains privacy sensitive information, that must be removed before publishing the dataset.

This also means that we expect research done on measurement.network infrastructure to be generally not for-profit or commercially motivated.

Respect the Infrastructure & The Internet

measurement.network provides resources which may not be easily available for many researchers. However, with that also comes the ability to cause notable harm by, e.g., making a mistake. Hence, please observe the following rules:

• Be honest. This is the most important principle.
  • If you make a mistake, openly communicate what happened why. We strongly believe that people tend to do the right thing, but sometimes the results are not what they expected. Only if you quickly communicate mistakes, can we all work towards still coming to a good outcome.
  • Openly declare limitations and risks of the measurements you are planning to do. Sometimes it might feel like a ‘very unlikely’ yet ‘severe’ risk might just distract and possible lead to the measurement not being run; However, the reviewers need to know, and will help to find ways to make things possible.
  • Share when you do not know something, or do not feel comfortable doing a technical task, even if it ‘might be expected you know’, and it feels embarrassing. Trust us, it isn’t embarrassing, and we are very much happy to help you learning how to do the thing you do not know (yet)
• Only use the resources we provide within the limit of and for the purpose you applied for. Do not overstep boundaries of the system or use the systems for another study ‘now that they are there’.
• Follow the abuse policy and make sure to handle requests for opt-out etc. quickly.
• In general, follow Internet measurement best practices as documented in, e.g., the Menlo Report.
• If you notice that your measurements have unintended side-effects, stop them, and figure out what these are, and how you can prevent them before continuing your measurements.
• While you are running measurements, please make sure that we can reach you, ideally by phone, messenger and email while the measurements are running.

Be Excellent to Each Other / Code-of-Conduct

Each participant around measurement.network commits to following the code-of-conduct. The applicable code-of-conduct for measurement.network is that of the RIPE Community, as documented in RIPE-766 or the most version that obsoleted that document.

Commitments of Reviewers

For reviewers, generally the same principles apply as for researchers applying for resources. However, in addition, we ask you to keep the work you are reviewing confidential until the authors publish it themselves. Furthermore, we ask you to follow the review guide.

Commitments of measurement.network

Measurement.network is run by volunteers. As such, some things can only happen in a best-effort manner.

• We will do our best to provide the infrastructure necessary to support your research. However, mistakes, bugs, or unforeseen effects may lead to service disruptions. We will generally try to fix such issues within 24 hours and communicate that the issue occurred to you, but this may not always work.
• Similarly, we try to handle abuse-requests within no more than 24h; However, there may be delay due to unexpected events.