Data Licensing

Licensing the data

A data licence agreement is a legal instrument that lets others know what they can and cannot do with your research data (and any documentation, scripts and metadata that are published with the data - information about software licensing can be found on the software licensing page). It is important to consider what kind of limitations are relevant. Usually, at least the following questions are considered:

  • Can people make copies or even distribute copies?
  • Do others (and you) reusing the dataset need to acknowledge you as the author of the original dataset? (This is called Attribution.)
  • Do others (and you) who reuse the dataset and/or make derivatives of the dataset need to share their work under a similar licence? (This is called Share-Alike.)
  • Can others (and you) use your dataset commercially? (A restriction on commercial use is called Non-Commercial.)
  • Can others (and you) create a new work based on the dataset? (This is called a Derivative.)

The considerations above are the ‘building blocks’ that Creative Commons licences use. There are also other considerations, and also other licences.

An image of open data, made up of public domain icons

In principle, Dataverse allows you to choose your terms of use. If you publish your data in Yoda, there is guidance available on how to choose a licence and how to customise licences. Some data repositories require you to use a certain licence if you want to deposit your data with them. At Dryad, for example, all datasets are published under the terms of Creative Commons Zero to minimise legal barriers and to maximise the impact for research and education. Some funders may also require that you publish the data as open data. Open data are data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share alike (Open Knowledge International definition). If you need help with drawing up licence agreements, you can contact the VU’s legal office.

Additional websites and tools:

Footnotes

  1. For the source code, see https://github.com/ufal/public-license-selector/↩︎