Licenses are legal texts through which an author or the rights holder of a work authorizes third parties to reuse it under certain conditions. It is a non-exclusive grant of rights that may include reproduction, distribution, public communication, and transformation. Without any indication, it should be understood that the work is offered with "All rights reserved," and therefore, permission must be sought for its reuse, except in cases provided by applicable law. In the case of research data, it should be considered that the license can apply to both individual data and the dataset or database as a whole. Although individual data may not be protectable, there is a sui generis right that protects the extraction and reuse of elements from a database. Generally, licenses should include the management of this sui generis right to allow the reuse of the data. Licenses grant intellectual property rights, but it is important to note that when sharing research data, other rights may need to be managed, such as personal rights, industrial property rights, or confidentiality agreements. |
Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that provides legal tools for sharing and facilitating the reuse of intellectual works. Currently, it offers six licenses with different elements depending on the uses to be authorized and the applicable conditions:
Starting from version 4.0 of Creative Commons licenses, the legal text of the licenses includes a specific section on the "sui generis" right of databases. Any database that includes a substantial part or the entirety of the content of another database is considered a derivative work of that database. Therefore, the conditions of non-commercial use, no derivative works, or share alike will affect this new database with elements from the existing one. Additionally, Creative Commons has another legal tool, CC0, to dedicate a work to the public domain from its creation. This dedication operates as a waiver of any intellectual property rights or legal action for the use of the work. Originally, CC0 was created to be applied to scientific databases, allowing the waiver of any existing sui generis right and the recognition of individual authorship, facilitating compliance with the standards of research communities.
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In the framework of the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Open Data Commons project was created in late 2007. Open Data Commons is a non-profit organization that has produced standard licenses specifically designed for research data and databases. The licenses of the Open Data Commons project are:
As stated in the preambles of these Open Data Commons licenses:
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In addition to the licenses offered by Creative Commons and the Open Data Commons initiative, there are other licenses created for sharing data. Among these, government licenses developed within open data projects of various administrations should be highlighted. Some of the most commonly used ones include:
These licenses are rarely used for data created by researchers, but they should be considered because the data provided by some of these government portals can serve as a source of information for subsequent research. These licenses do not include the "copyleft" condition and therefore do not require maintaining the same license on derivative works or materials. |
When choosing a license for data, datasets, or databases, consider the following:
Therefore, the choice of the license depends on many factors. In the case of projects funded under the Horizon 2020 program, it is recommended (Guidelines on Open Access to Scientific Publications and Research Data in Horizon 2020:) to use CC BY licenses or the CC0 tool, but the PDDL or ODC-BY licenses from the Open Data Commons project would be equally effective. It is important to note that these licenses are fully interoperable with others and facilitate the inclusion of data in other databases. Finally we offer the Licensing Assistant created by the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics that can help you decide which license to use for your dataset or software: https://ufal.github.io/public-license -selector/ |
The owner of the rights to the research data must make it clear what license will apply or whether it will be placed in the public domain. In addition, the repository where the research data is deposited will also specify the license that applies to it. Once you have decided which is the most suitable license you must stipulate the terms of the license within the data itself and within the Readme file, A mechanism for retrieving the full text of the license itself is also needed. As an example, this would be the suggested text for attaching the Open Data Commons PDDL license to a database:
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