The Metis data produced during the Nominal Mission Phase (NMP) are made available freely and without restrictions to all parties and for all purposes after three months from the science telemetry download. Data acquired during the Commissioning and Cruise Phase (CP) are available upon request. This is fully consistent with ESA’s open data policy.

As part of the development of collaboration with the broader solar and heliophysics community, however, Metis mission has defined some rules to govern how Metis instrument data should be used. They are briefly described below and are detailed in the User Guide for Solar Orbiter/Metis Data Products and Publication Policy document which this text refers to. These rules will apply starting from the beginning of the NMP (November 2021).

First-result publications and relevant ‘first’ publications related to first minimum perihelion (April 2022) and first high heliolatitude (February 2027) shall have the PI as first author, the contributors, the Metis core team, and Co-Is as co-authors.

Three months after the NMP data are downlinked to the ground and processed they are released to the public and are available through the Solar Orbiter Archive (SOAR) and can be freely used.

The PI recommends that scientists adhere to the following guidelines:

1. All publications using Metis data should:
   • be sent to the PI after submission to keep record of Metis publications,
   • acknowledge the data sources mentioning the correct DOI of the dataset used in the paper,
   • add to the acknowledgments the text given in Appendix C of the UG,
   • include in the list of co-authors the members of the Operations Team (as defined in the NMP link of Appendix B of UG) involved in the acquisition of the data, and
   • cite the instrument paper (Antonucci et al., A&A, 2019).
2. In case of any doubt about the instrument, users are encouraged to consult with the PI to discuss the appropriate use of instrument data or model. Metis team should facilitate this process, serving as the contact point between PI and users in most cases.
3. Low latency data are not intended for quantitative analysis and therefore they should not be used for scientific purposes.

The Metis Team has the privilege to use Metis data from Commissioning and Cruise Phase and from the Nominal Mission Phase before they become publicly available in the Solar Orbiter Archive (SOAR), but everyone is invited and welcome to collaborate with the team.

What type of data and when they are available can be found in the Observation summary section.