European Meningococcal Epidemiology in Real Time (EMERT) Policy Document

  1. The purpose of EMERT is to provide real time molecular epidemiology for invasive meningococci circulating in Europe. EMERT compiles data from European national reference laboratories.
  2. The EMERT website is located and managed at the Peter Medawar Building for Pathogen Research, University of Oxford, which provides the resources for this project. The persons responsible for the site (hereafter the Management Team) are as follows:
    • The oversight committee: (TO BE ANNOUNCED)
    • Website and database manager: Dr Keith Jolley (hereafter, the webmaster)
    • The above persons will not have any special privileges with regard to the analysis or publication of data compared to other users.
  3. The laboratory submitting data to EMERT remains the owner of these data. To use unpublished data for publication purposes (conference presentations, internet presentations, journal publications), users of the database must obtain permission from the owner. However, the website must be acknowledged in all publications.
  4. The preferred format of the acknowledgement is: This publication made use of the European Meningococcal Epidemiology in Real Time (EMERT) website (http://emgm.eu/emert/) developed by Keith Jolley sited at the University of Oxford. The development of this site has been funded by the Wellcome Trust and European Union.
  5. Data from other users of the database may not be provided to a third party without permission of the owner of the data.
  6. As stated in (2), the Management Team will not have special privileges to analyse unpublished data for research purposes without the prior consent of the data owners. However, the Management Team reserves the right to provide 'current status' information on the website or in review articles including broad breakdowns by serogroup and country
  7. Participants and data submission
    • Multiple user accounts can be associated with an individual laboratory - submissions can be made from any of these and view access will be provided to all associated accounts.
    • Only laboratories that are actively submitting data retain view access. Data will be available to view if the participant has made a submission within a set period (currently in the last 12 weeks).
    • Participants will be able to view data from the whole database. These data are only available to participants.
    • No patient information is recorded.
    • Even minimal isolate information may be valuable, so if only a serogroup assignment or non-culture diagnosis is available, please still submit.
    • Fields collected are: lab sample id, date received, date sampled, serogroup, culture status, PorA VR1/VR2, FetA VR, ST. Only lab id and date received are compulsory fields, but ideally as many fields as are available should be entered.
    • Submitters can modify their records once submitted, for example to add further fields.