1. VIN regularly surveys members of the VIN Community.
    
2. The purpose of these surveys is to collect valuable information to aid the membership and advance veterinary medicine.
    
3. The VIN survey team examines and evaluates surveys for topics that members are likely to find interesting. Surveys on topics VIN members are unlikely to find interesting will not be considered.
    
4. To ensure the privacy of members of the VIN Community, VIN does not routinely promote or refer VIN members to any surveys that use external survey links (e.g. Qualtrics, Survey Monkey etc.). With few exceptions, and at the sole discretion of the VIN Survey Team, all surveys sent to members of the VIN Community are to be built within the VIN survey system.
    
   
   1. Any exceptions to the above rule must be of extreme value to members of the VIN Community and other veterinary colleagues, have no commercial affiliation, and not collect any identifying information – to ensure the privacy of members of the VIN Community.
       
5. VIN does not help with or distribute surveys that have a clear commercial interest (or even a suggestion of marketing). VIN does not do market feasibility studies for products or services.
    
6. VIN rarely conducts surveys created and authored by students, interns or residents. We have learned from experience that most of these remain unpublished.
    
7. Almost all surveys require development with the VIN Survey team to ensure that questions are appropriate, comprehensive and capture the correct audience as rapidly as possible.
    
8. Survey development often takes several months. Rarely can a survey be adopted, uploaded and distributed without substantial editing and design contributions by the VIN Survey team.
    
9. VIN distributes the preliminary survey results to participants shortly after the conclusion of data acquisition. These results are largely un-analyzed graphical presentations that are restricted to the participant list and for a limited time (usually 2 weeks). If the data are not published as a manuscript within 12 months, VIN reserves the right to provide access to the preliminary results to all VIN members without restrictions.
    
10. VIN requires that any survey distributed to the VIN membership and subsequently published as a paper acknowledges the role of VIN in the study. Co-authorship or other acknowledgements are negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

For more information contact surveys@vin.com.