How to License Research Data

A Digital Curation Centre and JISC Legal

‘working level’ guide

How to License

Research Data

Alex Ball (DCC)

Digital Curation Centre, 2014.

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

SQW Consulting & LISU. (2008,

September). Open access to re-

search outputs (§3.10). Swindon:

Research Councils UK. retrieved

from http://www .rcuk.ac.uk/

RCUK-prod/assets/documents/

news/oareport.pdf.

Examples of journals with such a

policy include the American

Economic Review, the Journal of

Evolutionary Biology, and Clinical

Infectious Diseases.

Stodden, V. (2009). Enabling repro-

ducible research: Open licensing for

scientiﬁc innovation. International

Journal of Communications Law and

Policy, 13, 1–25. Retrieved from

http://www.ijclp.net/files/

ijclp

web-doc

1-13-2009.pdf.

Open to all? Case studies of openness

in research. (2010, September).

Research Information Network and

National Endowment for Science,

Technology and the Arts. Retrieved

from http://www.rin .ac .uk/

system/ files/attachments/

NESTA-RIN

Open

Science

V01

.pdf.

Pienta, A. M., Alter, G. C. & Lyle,

J. A. (2010, April). The enduring

value of social science research: The

use and reuse of primary research

data. Paper from the Organisation,

Economics and Policy of Scientiﬁc

Research workshop, Torino, Italy.

Retrieved from http://hdl.handle

.net/2027.42/78307.

How to License Research Data

Introduction

This guide will help you decide how to apply a licence to your research data, and which

licence would be most suitable. It should provide you with an awareness of why

licensing data is important, the impact licences have on future research, and the

potential pitfalls to avoid. It concentrates on the UK context, though some aspects

apply internationally; it does not, however, provide legal advice. The guide should

interest both the principal investigators and researchers responsible for the data, and

those who provide access to them through a data centre, repository or archive.

Why license research data?

While practice varies from discipline to discipline, there is an

increasing trend towards the planned release of research data. The

need for data licensing arises directly from such releases, so the

ﬁrst question to ask is why research data should be released at all.

A signiﬁcant number of research funders now require that data

produced in the course of the research they fund should be made

available for other researchers to discover, examine and build upon.

The rationale given by UK funders is that opening up the data

allows for new knowledge to be discovered through comparative

studies, data mining and so on; it also allows greater scrutiny of

how research conclusions have been reached, potentially driving

up research quality.

Some journals are taking a similar stance,

requiring that authors deposit their supporting data either with the

journal itself or with a recognised data repository.

There are many additional reasons why releasing data can be

in a researcher’s interests.

3,4

The discipline of working up data

for eventual release helps in ensuring that a full and clear record

is preserved of how the conclusions were reached from the data,

protecting the researcher from potential challenges. A culture of

openness deters fraud, encourages learning from mistakes as well

as from successes, and breaks down barriers to interdisciplinary

and ‘citizen science’ research. The availability of the data, alongside

associated tools and protocols, increases the efﬁciency of research

by reducing both data collection costs and the possibility of

duplication. It also has the potential to increase the impact of the

research, not only academically,

but also economically and socially.

Merely releasing data without making clear their terms of

use can be somewhat counter-productive, though. The default

legal position on how data may be used in any given context is

hard to untangle, not least because different jurisdictions apply

different standards of creativity, skill, labour and expense when

judging whether copyright or similar rights pertain. The situation is

Data. (2012, June 12). Retrieved

from Creative Commons website:

http://wiki.creativecommons

.org/Data.

Telstra Corporation Limited v Phone

Directories Company Pty Ltd [2010]

FCAFC 149. Retrieved 10 January

2010, from http://www.austlii.

edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCAFC/

2010/149.html

Directive 96/9/EC of the European

Parliament and of the Council of 11

March 1996 on the legal protection

of databases. (1996, March 27).

Ofﬁcial Journal of the European

Union, L077, 20–28. Retrieved from

http://eur -lex .europa .eu/

LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=

CELEX:31996L0009:EN:HTML.

Berne Convention for the Protec-

tion of Literary and Artistic Works.

(1979). Retrieved from World In-

tellectual Property Organization

website: http://www.wipo.int/

treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs

wo001.html.

Fitzgerald, A. & Pappalardo, K.

(2009, November 5). Creative

Commons and data. Melbourne:

Australian National Data Service.

Retrieved from http://ands.org

.au/guides/cc-and-data.html.

‘An intellectual property (IP)

licence is effectively a promise

not to sue for infringement of

an intellectual property right

(IPR).’

– Irish, V. (2005). IEE Management of

Technology: No. 22. Intellectual

property rights for engineers (2nd ed.,

p. 173). London: Institution of

Electrical Engineers

complicated by the fact that different aspects of a database – ﬁeld

values (i.e. the data themselves), ﬁeld names, the structure and data

model for the database, data entry interfaces, visualisations and

reports derived from the data – may be treated quite differently.

In the US, there is a strong emphasis on creativity, so straight-

forward tables of, say, sensor data are unlikely to attract copyright.

In Australia, creativity is not relevant but originality is. Originality

is judged on a range of factors, including skill and labour, but the

skill and labour have to relate directly to the work in question: the

effort spent compiling a database does not necessarily affect the

originality of a report generated from it.

Within the EU, the act

of compiling a database attracts copyright insofar as the compiler

has exercised intellectual judgement in selecting or arranging the

data.

There is also a separate database right that applies to the

contents of a database where a substantial investment was made to

obtain, verify or present them. The thrust of the database right is

that users may not extract or reuse more than an insubstantial part

of the contents without authorisation from the compiler, unless

certain exemptions apply. One of the exemptions is for teaching

and scientiﬁc research, but as the EU Database Directive does

not commit Member States to respecting it, it may not apply in all

European countries.

Indeed, another potential source of confusion are the variations

between jurisdictions in what can be done with copyright material.

While the Berne Convention

provides a level of consistency among

its signatories – which includes most but by no means all countries

– there are still variations in the exemptions that each jurisdiction

provides, and subtle differences concerning, for example, which

acts count as copying, and what constitutes an insubstantial use

or extract of a work. The latter is an important point because

the exemptions to copyright and database rights permit a dataset

to be compiled from insubstantial extracts from a number of

other datasets,

but the fact of whether the extracts are indeed

insubstantial might be contested.

With all these complexities and ambiguities surrounding the

rights of database compilers, reusers need clear guidance from

compilers on what they are allowed to do with the data.

Licensing concepts

The two most effective ways of communicating permissions to

potential reusers of data are licences and waivers. A licence in this

context is a legal instrument for a rights holder to permit a second

party to do things that would otherwise infringe on the rights held.

The ﬁrst thing to note is that only the rights holder (or someone

with a right or licence to act on their behalf) can grant a licence;

it is therefore imperative that the intellectual property rights (IPR)

pertaining to the data are established before any licensing takes

place. The second thing to note is that while it is the nature of a

licence to expand rather than restrict what a licensee can do, some

licences are presented within contracts, and contracts can place

additional restrictions on the licensee and indeed the licensor.

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Protocol for Implementing

Open Access Data (§5.3). (2007,

December 20). Retrieved from

Science Commons website: http:

//sciencecommons.org/projects/

publishing/open -access-data

-protocol/.

OCLC, for example, builds ﬂex-

ibility into its use of the ODC-By

licence by allowing ‘in circumstances

where providing the full attribution

statement . . . is not technically feas-

ible, the use of canonical [dataset]

URIs is adequate . . . ’ alongside

examples of acceptable practice

(Data licenses and attribution. [n.d.].

Retrieved from OCLC Website:

http://www .oclc .org/data/

attribution.en.html ).

For example, the GNU Project

maintains a list of licences for code

which permit redistribution under

the GNU General Public Licence

(GPL) and whose terms the GPL

can accommodate (Various Licenses

and Comments about Them. [2010,

August 9]. Retrieved from GNU

website: http://www .gnu.org/

licenses/license-list.html ).

Creative Commons maintains

lists of licences into which its Share

Alike licences may be converted

by derived works, but these are

currently empty (Compatible Li-

censes. [n.d.]. Retrieved from

Creative Commons Website:

https://creativecommons.org/

compatiblelicenses ).

Netpop Research. (2009, Septem-

ber). Deﬁning ‘Noncommercial’:

A study of how the online popula-

tion understands ‘Noncommercial

Use’. San Francisco, CA: Creat-

ive Commons. Retrieved from

http://wiki .creativecommons

.org/Defining

Noncommercial.

A waiver, by contrast, is a legal instrument for giving up one’s

rights to a resource, so that infringement becomes a non-issue.

Again, only the entity that holds the rights (or someone with a

right or licence to act on their behalf) can waive them. Note that a

waiver does not authorise other parties to claim rights – as opposed

to freedoms – they did not previously have.

Common terms

Licences typically grant permissions on condition that certain terms

are met. While the precise details vary, three conditions commonly

found in licences are attribution, copyleft, and non-commerciality.

• An attribution requirement means that the licensor must

be given due credit for the work when it is distributed,

displayed, performed, or used to derive a new work.

• A copyleft requirement means that any new works derived

from the licensed one must be released under the same

license, and only that licence.

• The intent of a non-commercial licence is to prevent the

licensee from exploiting the work commercially. Such

licences are often used as part of a dual-licensing regime (see

‘Multiple licensing’, below), where the alternative licence

allows commercial uses but requires payment to the licensor.

While these all have their uses, they can cause problems in the

context of datasets.

Datasets are particularly prone to attribution stacking, where a

derivative work must acknowledge all contributors to each work

from which it is derived, no matter how distantly. If a dataset

is at the end of a long chain of derivations, or if large teams

of contributors were involved, the list of credits might well be

considered too unwieldy.

The problem is magniﬁed if different

sets of contributors have to be credited in a different way, especially

if automated methods are used to assemble the dataset – some of

the beneﬁts of automation are lost if attribution conditions have

to be inspected manually. Some licenses and licensors tackle this

problem by specifying lightweight attribution mechanisms.

The problem with copyleft licences is they prevent the licensed

data being combined with data released under a different copyleft

licence: the derived dataset would not be able to satisfy both sets

of licence terms simultaneously. Some copyleft licences, however,

demonstrate a small amount of ﬂexibility in allowing derivative

works to be released under a compatible licence, that is, one that

applies approximately the same conditions.

Non-commercial licences may have wider implications than

intended due to the ambiguity of what constitutes a commercial

use.

Depending on one’s interpretation, it may or may not

preclude the data being used in support of works for which

an author is given recompense (such as textbooks), and might

preclude the data being used in support of works that are sold

(such as journal articles) even if the author does not beneﬁt

ﬁnancially.

Rothamsted Research Website,

U RL: http://www.rothamsted.ac

.uk/.

Multinational Brassica Genome

Project Website, U RL: http://www

.brassica.info/.

Licence Agreement. (2013,

December 16). Retrieved from

UK Data Service website: http:

//ukdataservice.ac.uk/media/

28102/licenceform.pdf.

Terms and Conditions of Access.

(2014, April 9). Retrieved from

UK Data Service website: http:

//www.esds.ac.uk/orderingData/

termsandconditions.asp.

ADS deposit licence, UR L: http:

//www .ahds.ac .uk/documents/

ahds-archaeology-licence-form

.doc.

The Terms of Use and Ac-

cess to ADS Resources. (n.d.).

Retrieved from Archaeology

Data Service website: http://

archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/

advice/termsOfUseAndAccess.

In the UK, examples of public

sector data offered commercially

under bespoke licences include

those from the Ordnance Survey

(http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.

uk/business-and-government/

licensing/licences/) and the

Hydrographic Ofﬁce (http://www.

ukho.gov.uk/copyright/).

Prepared licences

Before considering the licensing options that are available, you

should ﬁrst check whether you are obliged or strongly encouraged

to use a certain licence as a condition of funding or deposit, or as a

matter of local policy.

Your department or institution may already have a licence

prepared for you to apply to your data. Rothamsted Research, a

BBSRC Institute, uses several different legacy licences for its own

data, each reﬂecting both a desire to see the data used in current

research, and caution against naïve or simplistic interpretation.

On the other hand, it also maintains some public domain genome

sequences as part of the Multinational Brassica Genome Project.

Some data centres have licences that depositors must grant as a

condition of deposit. Contributors to the UK Data Archive (UKDA)

are required to sign a standard licence agreement that clariﬁes the

respective rights and responsibilities of both parties and permits

the UKDA to perform its curatorial functions.

In turn, the UKDA

makes the data available under various licences depending on the

type of data. Open data may use the Open Government Licence,

the Creative Commons BY-SA or BY-NC-SA version 4.0 licences,

or the World Bank Terms of Use (see ‘Standard licences’ below).

Safeguarded data are made available under one of two bespoke

licences: the Special Licence if the data are sensitive, otherwise the

End User Licence with or without special (additional) conditions.

Similarly, researchers depositing data with the Archaeology Data

Service (ADS) are required to sign a deposit licence.

Those using

data hosted by the ADS do so under both a brief licence and a

common access agreement.

Both the UKDA and ADS deposit licences are non-exclusive,

which means among other things that granting them does not

prevent you hosting a copy of the data yourself and distributing it

under a different licence if you wish.

Bespoke licences

Writing a bespoke licence for your data is not a trivial undertaking,

and almost certainly unnecessary in the light of the standard

licences available (see ‘Standard licences’ below). Furthermore,

using a standard licence helps the users of your data as it reduces

the number of licences with which they have to work, and aids

interoperability and automation as described above. There are

circumstances, though, in which it might be worth writing a custom

licence: where the data have signiﬁcant commercial value,

where you need to clarify your responsibilities and those of reusers

in respect of the data.

If you decide to do this, in the ﬁrst instance you should consult

with your organisation’s research ofﬁce, commercialisation services

team and/or legal department. At the very least they will be able

to advise you on the implications of including particular clauses or

using particular wording in the licence; they may have standard

AusGOAL Restrictive Licence

template, U R L: http:// www

.ausgoal.gov .au/restrictive

-licence-template.

AusGOAL. (2011, May). Aus-

tralian Governments Open Access

and Licensing Framework. (2011,

May). Retrieved from Australian Na-

tional Data Service website: http:

//www .ands .org .au/guides/

ausgoal-awareness.html.

AMI Meeting Corpus Website,

U RL: http://groups.inf.ed.ac

.uk/ami/corpus/.

The AMI Meeting Corpus License

is similar but not identical to the

Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0

Licence; U R L: http://groups.inf.

ed.ac.uk/ami/corpus/license.

shtml.

‘Creative Commons has the op-

tion to include commercial uses

– we use the Non-Commercial

one, though, because some con-

tributors don’t want to lose out

on what they think more likely

revenue (they think compan-

ies have money and research

groups don’t), and because

commercial takers can’t accept

the Share Alike terms.’

– Researcher from the AMI Project,

University of Edinburgh

Creative Commons Website, U R L:

http://creativecommons.org/.

RDF and rights expression lan-

guages are discussed under ‘Mechan-

isms for licensing data’ below.

Creative Commons at a glance

Good for

• very simple, factual datasets

• data to be used automatically

Watch out for

• versions: use v. 4 or later

• attribution stacking

• the NC condition: only use with

dual licensing

• the SA condition as it reduces inter-

operability

• the ND condition as it severely re-

stricts reuse

texts or templates you could use, or may even offer to write the

licence for you.

An example of the template approach is the Restrictive Licence

(RL)

that was developed as part of Queensland’s Government

Information Licensing Framework (GILF) and later adopted into the

Australian Governments Open Access and Licensing Framework

(AusGOAL).

This licence, intended for government information

and data, allows licensors to construct their own custom licence by

ﬁlling out some simple forms. Left unmodiﬁed, the licence does not

permit the licensee to do anything beyond what is allowed under

and redistribution. By ﬁlling out the licence’s schedules, however,

one can adjust the copying and distribution permissions, ﬁx the

term of the licence, restrict usage geographically, or add speciﬁc

conditions or permissions. The completed template takes the form

of an agreement that both licensor and licensee have to sign, so it

cannot be used to give blanket permissions.

An example of fully bespoke licences are the ones used by the

Augmented Multi-Party Interaction (AMI) Project at the University

of Edinburgh.

The project released its AMI Meeting Corpus under

two licences written by the Edinburgh Research and Innovation

unit. One was a free, non-commercial, copyleft licence,

and the

other a chargeable commercial licence. This is also an example of a

dual licensing arrangement (see ‘Multiple licensing’ below).

Standard licences

While bespoke licences are useful for catering for very speciﬁc

circumstances, most research projects would be better served

using one of the standard licences. Below is a selection of the

standard licences available, along with reasons for and against using

each one. Please note that these licences can be terminated only

by expiry of the licensor’s IPR or, for a particular licensee, through

breach of terms.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-proﬁt corporation set up in 2001 for

the purpose of producing simple yet robust licences for creative

works.

These licences give the creators of such works ﬁner-

grained control over how they may be used than simply declaring

them public domain or reserving all rights. As well as the legal text,

the licences all have quick clear summaries and a canonical URL for

use in HTML, RDF and other code. A rights expression language is

also provided for use with RDF.

While originally aimed at works

such as music, images and video, Creative Commons licences have

been used widely for most forms of original content, including data.

There are six main Creative Commons licences. While the

spirit behind them has remained constant, the wording of their

legal deeds has been revised over time, resulting in different

versions, and adapted to different legal jurisdictions, resulting in

different ports.

1 1

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1 0

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Frequently Asked Questions (sec-

tion entitled ‘Does my use violate

the NonCommercial clause of the li-

censes?’). (2014, June 24). Retrieved

from Creative Commons wiki: http:

//wiki.creativecommons.org/

Frequently

Asked

Questions.

The strength of a copyleft clause

refers to the range of derivations to

which it applies, with weaker clauses

applying to a narrower range. For

example, giving a software library

a weak copyleft licence means that

all future versions/modiﬁcations of

that library inherit the licence, but

software that merely depends on

that library does not.

CC BY, U R L: http : / /

creativecommons.org/licenses/

by/4.0.

CC BY-SA, U RL: http : / /

creativecommons.org/licenses/

by-sa/4.0.

CC BY-ND, U R L: http:/ /

creativecommons.org/licenses/

by-nd/4.0.

CC BY-NC, URL: http://

creativecommons.org/licenses/

by-nc/4.0.

CC BY-NC-SA, U RL: http://

creativecommons.org/licenses/

by-nc-sa/4.0.

CC BY-NC-ND, U R L: http://

creativecommons.org/licenses/

by-nc-nd/4.0.

More precisely, the ports of the

version 3 licences to European

jurisdictions fully waive the sui

generis database right, while all other

ports and the unported versions fully

reserve it.

Each licence includes the Attribution b condition. In the version

3 licences and earlier, it is left up to the licensor to specify the way

in which credit is given. Recognising the difﬁculties this may cause

in the context of attribution stacking, the version 4 licences can be

satisﬁed by a link to a Web page containing attribution information,

though licensors can specify additional, alternative mechanisms.

There are three other conditions that licensors can add, and

the various possible combinations produce the six licences. Using

just the Attribution condition is known as the CC BY licence.

There is a Non-Commercial n condition, where commercial is

deﬁned as ‘primarily intended for or directed toward commercial

advantage or monetary compensation’.

The Share Alike a condition inserts a strong copyleft clause into

the licence.

The version 1 licences are very strict: derivations

may only use the exact same version 1 licence. The version 2

licences onwards, however, allow derivations to use a later version

or a different port of the same license. Nevertheless, derivations

may not use a Creative Commons licence with a different set of

conditions.

Finally, including the No Derivatives d condition in the version

3 licences and earlier means that the licensee is forbidden from

altering, transforming or building upon the work. The version 4

condition is more ﬂexible: it allows these things for private use, but

prevents the licensee from sharing the derivations. It and the Share

Alike condition are mutually exclusive.

The six permutations are therefore

b Attribution (CC BY);

ba Attribution Share Alike (CC BY-SA);

bd Attribution No Derivatives (CC BY-ND);

bn Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC);

bna Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC BY-NC-

SA);

bnd Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-

ND).

The versions of the licences prior to version 4 were not

speciﬁcally aimed at data, so using them for such presents some

problems. The most signiﬁcant is that they do not explicitly cover

sui generis database rights such as the one in force in the European

Union.

This means, for example, that use of substantial portions

of a database licensed using the unported terms of version 3 or

earlier may constitute a rights infringement in such jurisdictions.

The version 4 licences, however, do explicitly include sui generis

database rights unless the licensor speciﬁcally reserves them.

All versions of the licences treat datasets and databases

as a whole: they do not treat the individual data themselves

differently from the collection/database. This might be considered

an advantage in terms of simplicity, but means they cannot be used

without difﬁculty in certain complex cases such as collections of

variously copyrighted works.

Similarly, the licences do not distinguish using data as part of

a new collection/database from using them to generate content

Example

In 2010, OpenStreetMap changed its

licence from CC BY-SA 2.0 to ODC-

ODbL 1.0 because ODbL

• handled database rights;

• enforced copyleft for derived data

but not derived maps;

• allowed the project to speak for all

contributors.

Open Data Commons Website,

U RL: http://opendatacommons

.org/.

TCL, U R L: http://tinyurl

.com/p3ag72b.

ODC-By at a glance

Good for

• most databases and datasets

• data to be used automatically

• data to be used for generating non-

data products

Watch out for

• attribution stacking

ODC-By, URL: http : / /

opendatacommons.org/licenses/

by/.

Example notice: ‘Contains inform-

ation from 〈database〉 which is made

available under the ODC Attribution

License.’

ODC-ODbL at a glance

Good for

• most databases and datasets

• data to be used automatically

• data to be used for generating non-

data products

Watch out for

• attribution stacking

• the copyleft condition as it reduces

interoperability

• the DRM clause as it may put off

some reusers

ODC-ODbL, UR L: http://

opendatacommons.org/licenses/

odbl/.

Open Government Licence for

public sector information, U RL:

http://www .nationalarchives

.gov.uk/doc/open-government

-licence/version/2/.

A machine-readable version

of the Open Government Li-

cence is available at http: //

reference.data.gov.uk/id/open

-government-licence.

(graphs, models, maps, etc.). This means the Share Alike and No

Derivatives conditions might have further reaching consequences

than intended. Indeed, the No Derivatives condition would likely

disallow most substantive types of reuse, leaving only such cases as

checking that data within the set derive from each other as claimed.

It should therefore be avoided.

In addition to the six main licences, Creative Commons

provides tools for entering works into the public domain, or

certifying works as already being in the public domain (see ‘Public

domain’, below).

Open Data Commons

The Open Data Commons Project

was set up in 2007 to

develop a successor to the Talis Community Licence (TCL).

The ﬁrst licence to be produced was a public domain dedication

for databases. The project transferred to the Open Knowledge

Foundation in 2009 and has produced two further licences having

some of the character of the Creative Commons licences, but

designed speciﬁcally for databases. All three follow the Creative

Commons model of providing a clear summary and canonical URL

alongside the full legal text.

The Open Data Commons Attribution Licence (ODC-By)

allows licensees to copy, distribute and use the database, to

produce works from it and to modify, transform and build upon

it for any purpose.

If content is generated from the data, that

content should include or accompany a notice explaining that

the database was used in its creation.

If the database is used

substantially to create a new database or collection of databases,

the licence URL or text and copyright/database right notices must

be distributed with the new database or collection.

The Open Data Commons Open Database Licence (ODC-

ODbL) is the same as ODC-By but for a couple of additional

conditions.

It adds a copyleft condition that applies to new

databases derived from the database (but not collections of

databases or non-database content produced directly from it); this

condition would be satisﬁed by future versions of the same licence

or a compatible one as judged by the licensor. The other condition

is that technological restrictions such as Digital Rights Management

(DRM) mechanisms can only be applied to the database or a

new database derived from it if an alternative copy without the

restrictions is made equally available.

Being written in database terms, these licences are suited

to a wider range of research data than the Creative Commons

equivalents. The ODC-ODbL copyleft condition is also slightly

more ﬂexible than Creative Commons’ Share Alike, though the

ODC attribution requirement is slightly less ﬂexible.

Open/Non-Commercial Government Licence

The Open Government Licence (OGL) was released as part of the

UK Government Licensing Framework in September 2010; version

2 was released in June 2013.

It is intended for UK public sector

OGL at a glance

Good for

• UK public sector databases and

datasets

• data to be used automatically

Watch out for

• attribution stacking if used with dif-

ferently licensed data

• categories of data that cannot be li-

censed in this way

• ties to the UK legal context

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‘Contains public sector inform-

ation licensed under the Open

Government Licence v2.0.’

NCGL at a glance

Good for

• commercially valuable UK public

sector databases and datasets

• data to be used automatically

Watch out for

• attribution stacking if used with dif-

ferently licensed data

• restrictions on uses: only use with

dual licensing

• categories of data that cannot be li-

censed in this way

• ties to the UK legal context

Non-Commercial Govern-

ment Licence for public sector

information, U R L: http://www

.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/

non -commercial -government

-licence / non -commercial

-government-licence.htm.

A machine-readable version of

the Non-Commercial Government

Licence is available at http://

reference .data .gov .uk/id/

non -commercial -government

-licence.

Public domain at a glance

Good for

• most databases and datasets

• data to be used by anyone or any

tool

• data to be used for any purpose

Watch out for

• lack of control over how database

is reused

• lack of protection against unfair

competition

and government resources, particularly datasets, source code and

collected or original information; that it cannot be used by licensors

outside the UK is not directly stated, but is implied by the wording

of its exemptions.

The terms of the licence are similar to CC BY in that attribution

is required, derivative works and commercial uses are explicitly

allowed, and there is no copyleft condition. Version 1 of the licence

contained some additional conditions; most of them have been

removed from version 2, except that derivative works must not be

represented as having ofﬁcial status.

There are also categories of information for which the licence

explicitly does not permit use:

• personal information;

• unpublished information, other than that disclosed under

information access legislation (FoIA, etc.);

• public sector logos, armorial bearings, etc. other than as an

integral part of a document or dataset;

• military insignia;

• identity documents;

• information subject to patents, trademarks, design rights,

third party copyright (unless authorised), etc.

The attribution condition is couched in ﬂexible terms so as to

mitigate the problem of attribution stacking. In cases of data being

drawn together from many different datasets, a simple generic

statement will satisfy the licence terms.

Furthermore, if a derived

dataset is released under CC BY version 4 or ODC-By, users

complying with that licence’s attribution requirement automatically

satisfy those of the OGL.

A non-commercial variant was introduced in July 2011,

where commercial uses are understood to be ‘primarily intended

for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary

compensation’. The current version retains some of the additional

conditions from OGL version 1 not present in version 2:

• the resource must not be used to mislead others; and

• use of the resource must not breach the Data Protection

Act 1998 or the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC

Directive) Regulations 2003.

Notably, while the licence as a whole is not copyleft, the non-

commercial aspect of it is. In other words, it requires that any

derivations are released under a non-commercial licence.

Public domain

The most permissive way of releasing data is under a dedication

to the public domain. This is where all copyright interests and

database rights are waived, allowing the data to be used as freely as

possible. Dedicating a work to the public domain is not as simple

as it sounds, which is why Creative Commons and Open Data

Commons have produced special tools for the purpose.

CC0, U R L: http : / /

creativecommons .org /

publicdomain/zero/1.0/.

Peters, D. (2009, March 11).

Expanding the public domain: Part

zero. Retrieved from http://

creativecommons.org/weblog/

entry/13304.

CC Public Domain Mark, U R L:

http://creativecommons.org/

publicdomain/mark/1.0/.

Peters, D. (2010, October 11).

Creative Commons launches Public

Domain Mark: Europeana and

Cultural Heritage Institutions lead

early adoption. Retrieved from

http://creativecommons.org/

press-releases/entry/23755.

PDDL, U R L: http : / /

opendatacommons.org/licenses/

pddl/.

ODC Attribution-Sharealike

Community Norms, U R L: http:

//opendatacommons.org/norms/

odc-by-sa/.

ODC-DbCL, U R L: http://

opendatacommons.org/licenses/

dbcl/.

Murray, L. J. (2008). Plagiarism

and copyright infringement: The

costs of confusion. In C. Eisner & M.

Vicinus (Eds.), Originality, imitation

and plagiarism: Teaching writing in the

digital age (pp. 173–181). Ann Arbor,

MI: University of Michigan Press.

Appropriate Behavior when

Contributing and Using PIC Data.

(n.d.). Establishing the framework

for the long-term stewardship of

polar data and information. (n.d.).

Retrieved from Polar Information

Commons website: http://web

.archive.org/web/20140720090

800/http://www.polarcommons

.org/ethics-and-norms-of-data

-sharing.php.

Creative Commons Zero (CC0) is for dedicating works to

the public domain.

It works on two levels: as a waiver of a

person’s rights to the work, and in case that is not effective, as an

irrevocable, royalty-free and unconditional licence for anyone to

use the work for any purpose. The rights waived include database

rights, so CC0 is suitable for use with data.

There is also the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark (CC

PDM), a tool that anyone can use to assert that a work is already

in the public domain.

The motivation for the tool is to allow

public domain works to be more easily discovered and recognised

as such,

but it should not be used for waiving rights.

The Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and

Licence (PDDL) accomplishes much the same thing in much the

same way as CC0, but is worded speciﬁcally in database terms.

(It should not be confused with the deprecated Creative Commons

Public Domain Dedication and Certiﬁcation [CC PDDC] tool.)

The PDDL explicitly provides for a set of community norms to

be associated with a database, such as the Open Data Commons

Attribution-Sharealike Community Norms.

These express the

same ideals as the corresponding licence, but in the form of a code

of etiquette rather than a legal obligation.There is also the Open

Data Commons Database Contents Licence (ODC-DbCL), which

waives copyright for the contents of the database without affecting

the copyright or database right of the database itself.

Given that dedicating data to the public domain involves

permanently relinquishing so many rights and protections, including

protection against unfair competition, it is perhaps an unattractive

option for data whose creators have yet to fully exploit them, either

academically or commercially. Nevertheless, it does resolve many

of the ambiguities surrounding data use and reuse – to which parts

of a database copyright applies, the extent to which database rights

apply, what constitutes fair or insubstantial use, what constitutes

commercial use – and greatly simpliﬁes integration with other data.

While community norms documents have no legal force, unlike

community shares the values reﬂected and incorporates the norms

into its governance mechanisms. The paradigmatic example is the

prohibition of plagiarism, which as a community norm has arguably

a greater moral force than copyright law.

In the data context,

Polar Science is a ﬁeld in which community norms are being used

to ensure both high quality contributions and respectful reuse of

data without resorting to legal measures.

Multiple licensing

In cases where none of the above licences are entirely satisfactory,

it may be possible to use a multiple licensing approach. This would

allow recipients of the data to choose from a speciﬁed set the

licence under which they use the data.

Multiple licensing is usually used in the open source software

world to achieve one of two aims. The ﬁrst is to control, rather

than freely permit or forbid outright, use of the software in

Blanco, E. (2012, September

9). Dual-licensing as a business

model. Retrieved from OSS Watch

website: http://oss-watch.ac

.uk/resources/duallicence2.

Välimäki, M. (2003). Dual li-

censing in open source software

industry. Systemes d’Information et

Management, 8(1), 63–75. Retrieved

from http://ssrn.com/abstract=

1261644

SeaMonkey Legal Resources.

(2012, May 7). Retrieved from

SeaMonkey Project website: http:

//www.seamonkey-project.org/

legal/.

Meeker, H. (2005, April 6). Dual-

licensing open source business

models. Retrieved from http:

//linux .sys -con .com/node/

49061/print.

When a Company Asks For

Your Copyright. (2010, October

3). Retrieved from GNU Pro-

ject website: http://www .gnu

.org/philosophy/assigning

-copyright.html.

Core Product

Development

Community

Development

Partners

Reseller

Copyleft Users Customers



Copyleft

Licence

Licence fees

Licence

Licence fees

Copyleft

Migration

Figure 1: Licence streams of a core

product in a simpliﬁed dual licensing

model (adapted from Välimäki,

2003).

commercial or proprietary applications, thereby providing a means

of generating income from the open source code. The second is

to resolve the compatibility problems that exist between copyleft

licences.

In the language of the Creative Commons licences, it

allows owners of source code to address the issues associated with

the Non-Commercial and Share-Alike clauses, respectively.

In the ﬁrst case, a typical scenario would be for the owners of

the source code to release it under an open source licence with

a strong copyleft clause, such as the GNU General Public Licence

(GPL). At the same time, they offer the source code under an

alternative licence without the copyleft clause, and charge a fee for

the use of this less-demanding licence.

This dual licensing regime

gives developers the choice of using the code for free in free, open

source software, or paying a fee to use the code in closed source,

possibly commercial software.

In the second case, the owners of the source code allow

developers to use it under one of several open source licences,

broadening the range of code with which it can be combined. For

example, the source code of the SeaMonkey Internet application

suite is triple-licensed under the Mozilla Public Licence (MPL), the

GNU General Public Licence (GPL) and the GNU Lesser General

Public Licence (LGPL).

While multiple licensing can be a useful strategy, there are some

issues that need to be borne in mind. The option to multiply license

a dataset is certainly available to you if you hold all the rights that

pertain to the dataset: that is, you hold rights over the dataset, and

any aspect of the data for which you do not hold rights is public

domain or exempt from copyright/database right restrictions. If

this is not the case then what you can do is, of course, determined

by the terms of the licensed data that contributes to your dataset:

• If the licence applies a copyleft condition to derived works/

databases, you must respect that and license the derived

dataset in the same way.

• If the licence applies a non-commercial condition to uses of

the licensed data, then you should not charge others for any

of the licences under which you release your derived dataset,

though this does not prevent you using multiple licensing as a

compatibility strategy.

In any event, whenever licensing a dataset containing data licensed

to you, you should be careful not to claim rights you do not hold.

Multiple licensing works both ways, of course. If the ability

to license your derived dataset as you please is important to you,

you may be able to negotiate a special licence or contractual

arrangement with the other rights holders that allows you to do

this, in which case the rights holders are setting up a multiple

licensing regime of their own. Another, more extreme, possibility

is to negotiate a rights assignment.

57,58

By way of illustration, a dual licensing model working within

these constraints is shown in Figure 1. This model was devised

with software development in mind, though it could be applied to

situations where a data resource is expanded by many contributors

over time.

1 0

1 1

0 0

0 1

1 1

0 1

1 0

1 1

0 0

CrystalEye Website, U RL:

http://wwmm .ch .cam .ac .uk/

crystaleye/.

ISO/IEC 21000-5:2004. Informa-

tion technology – Multimedia frame-

work (MPEG-21) – Part 5: Rights

Expression Language. International

Organization for Standardization.

ODRL Community Group, U R L:

http://www.w3.org/community/

odrl/.

METSRights schema, UR L: http:

//www .loc .gov/standards/

rights/METSRights.xsd.

Abelson, H., Adida, B., Linksvayer,

M. & Yergler, N. (2008, March 3).

ccREL: The Creative Commons Rights

Expression Language. Version 1.0.

Creative Commons. Retrieved from

http://wiki .creativecommons

.org/images/d/d6/Ccrel-1.0

.pdf.

CC REL by Example. (n.d.).

Retrieved from Creative Com-

mons website: http :// labs

.creativecommons .org/2011/

ccrel-guide/.

Manola, F. & Miller, E. (Eds.).

(2004, February 10). RDF primer.

W3C Recommendation. W3C.

retrieved from http://www .w3

.org/TR/rdf-primer/.

Mechanisms for licensing data

Once you have decided on a suitable licence, all that remains is

to attach that licence to the data. There are a few different ways

of doing this, but mostly they involve a statement that the data is

released under a particular licence or public domain dedication,

and a mechanism for retrieving the full text of the licence itself.

As an example, the suggested text for attaching the Open Data

Commons PDDL to a database is as follows.

[This database is/These data are/〈name of dataset〉 is] made available under the Public

Domain Dedication and License v1.0 whose full text can be found at: http://

opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/1.0/

The rights statement should be displayed prominently, so that

any user of the data will realise that they are licensed or public

domain. It is important to note, though, that the ﬁrst inspection of

the data might be done by an automated tool rather than a human.

CrystalEye,

for example, is a database of crystal structures

compiled by automatically parsing journal articles and other data

sources. The problem for such efforts comes when the tool has

to review the IPR status of a data source, examine any available

licence terms, and decide whether to accept them. There are

three possible ways to overcome this difﬁculty:

1. a human could review each data source before letting the

tool use it;

2. a human could decide in advance under which licences the

tool would be allowed to use data, and the data provider

could label the data source in such a way that a tool could

tell under what licence it is released;

3. tool authors and data providers could agree a common

vocabulary for describing the capabilities of tools, and data

providers could associate with the data a machine-readable

list of operations that are, or are not, permitted.

The ﬁrst of these is not scalable. The third requires extensive

co-ordination and places limits on the capabilities an automated tool

can have, but once set up requires very little human intervention.

On a technical level it can be achieved through use of a Rights

Expression Language such as MPEG-21 REL,

Open Digital

Rights Language,

or METSRights.

Permissions and restrictions

written in such a language represent an arrangement in their own

right: strictly speaking they can only be used as an alternative

to, or replacement for, an actual licence, not as a machine-

actionable ‘explanation’ of one. The exception to this is the

Creative Commons Rights Expression Language, which delegates

the precise deﬁnition of its terms to the respective full legal codes

of the Creative Commons licences.

63,64

The second option is a compromise between the other two;

it only works well when data providers use standard licences

identiﬁed by standard URLs. For example, the machine-readable

equivalent of the ODC PDDL statement above would be a

Resource Description Framework (RDF) triple such as that shown

in Figure 2.

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">

<rdf:Description rdf:about="" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">

<dc:license rdf:resource="http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/1.0/"/>

</rdf:Description>

</rdf:RDF>

Figure 2: A rights statement en-

coded in RDF/XML. Note that the

rdf:about attribute should identify

the data to which the statement

applies. In the context of an XMP

packet, this attribute is left blank

to identify the resource in which

the packet is embedded (Extensible

Metadata Platform (XMP) speciﬁca-

tion, part 1: Data model, serialization,

and core properties. San Jose, CA:

Adobe Systems. Retrieved from

http://www.adobe.com /content/

dam/Adobe/en/devnet/xmp /pdfs/

XMPSpecificationPart1.pdf ).

Adida, B. & Birbeck, M. (Eds.).

(2008, October 14). RDFa primer:

Bridging the human and data Webs.

W3C Working Group Note. W3C.

retrieved from http://www .w3

.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/

1 0

0 0

1 0

0 0

1 0

0 0

1 1

1 0

1 1

METS Website, U RL: http :

//www.loc.gov/standards/mets/.

METSRights schema, UR L: http:

//www .loc .gov/standards/

rights/METSRights.xsd.

0 1

1 1

0 0

0 1

Again, this should be made available somewhere the tool would

look when downloading the data, such as within a dataset catalogue

record or landing page. If possible you should also include the rights

statement within each data ﬁle – the following list indicates how

this may be done for some common data formats:

XML Find a point in the document at which arbitrary XML can

be embedded and insert an RDF/XML block similar to that

shown in Figure 2.

MS Excel Add the human-readable statement to the Comments

document property.

MS Access Add the human-readable statement to the Comments

database property.

XHTML

Add the attributes version="XHTML+RDFa 1.0" and

xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" to the root

<html> element. Add the human-readable statement

somewhere in the document, marking up the link to the

full licence text as an <a> element with the attribute

rel="dc:license".

Failing that, you should incorporate the rights statement when

packaging data; indeed, it is good practice to do this anyway. The

following table shows where the statement should be added for

some common packaging standards. In most cases, the insertion

points speciﬁed permit arbitrary XML to be included; the simplest

option is therefore to insert an RDF/XML statement like that in

Figure 2 within the speciﬁed element, though in future it may be

possible to include an XHTML/RDFa fragment instead, along the

lines of the XHTML method given in the above list.

METS

In the manifest ﬁle, add the rights statement (or a link to it)

to the <rightsMD> element in the Administrative Metadata

section.

METS+METSRights

Within the <rightsMD> element in the

Administrative Metadata section of the manifest ﬁle,

add the hierarchy <mdWrap> › <xmlData>. Within that,

add a <mr:RightsDeclarationMD> element with its

RIGHTSCATEGORY attribute set correctly. Within that,

add a <mr:RightsDeclaration> element containing the

(plain text) human-readable rights statement; you should

also add a <mr:RightsHolder> element.

MODS Website, U RL: http:

//www.loc.gov/standards/mods/.

DDI Website, U RL: http:// www

.ddialliance.org/.

XFDU Website, U R L: http:

//sindbad.gsfc.nasa.gov/xfdu/.

0 1

1 1

0 1

0 0

1 1

0 0

1 0

1 1

Bekaert, J., Hochstenbach, P. &

Van de Sompel, H. (2003, Novem-

ber). Using MPEG-21 DIDL to

represent complex digital objects in

the Los Alamos National Laboratory

Digital Library. D-Lib Magazine,

9(11). doi:10.1045/november2003

-bekaert

IMS Content Packaging Website,

U RL: http://www.imsglobal.org/

content/packaging/.

0 0

0 1

1 0

1 1

0 1

1 1

0 0

1 0

1 1

1 0

1 1

0 1

1 0

0 0

0 1

1 1

0 1

1 1

0 0

1 1

1 0

METS+MODS

In the manifest ﬁle, add the rights statement (or

a link to it) to the <mods:accessCondition> element in

the Descriptive Metadata section.

DDI

Add the (plain text) human readable rights statement to

<Collection> › <DefaultAccess> › <AccessConditions>.

XFDU

In the Metadata section of the manifest ﬁle, add a

<metadataObject> element with attributes category="PDI",

classification="OTHER" and otherClass="ACCESS

RIGHTS". Within that, add a <metadataWrap> element with

attribute textInfo="license" or textInfo="Public

Domain declaration". Within that, add the rights state-

ment within an <xmlData> element. To link to the rights

statement instead, use the <dataObjectPointer> element

(if it is in the XFDU Package Interchange File) or the

<metadataReference> element (if elsewhere) instead of

the <metadataWrap> element.

MPEG-21

In the DIDL ﬁle, within the <Item> element con-

taining the data, add a <Description> element, and

within that, a <Statement> element with the attribute

mimeType="text/xml". Within that, add an <r:license>

element with the attribute xmlns:r="urn:mpeg:mpeg21:

2003:01-REL-R-NS". Within that, add an <r:otherInfo>

element and to that add the rights statement (or a link to

it).

IMS CP

In the manifest ﬁle, add the rights statement to the

<metadata> element directly within the <resource>

element containing the data.

If the data are to be packaged informally (in a ZIP or TAR

ﬁle, or an ordinary directory, for example) the rights statement

should be included in an obvious introductory document, such as a

readme.txt ﬁle, at the top level of the directory structure.

In addition to these methods, it is also a good idea to ensure

the rights statement is clearly displayed on pages from which

the data may be downloaded. You might consider introducing a

click-through notice, so that whenever someone requests the data,

they are asked to assent to the licence terms before the transfer

will proceed, but bear in mind this interferes with the ability of

automated tools to access the data.

The example rights statements shown above both use URLs to

specify the full legal text of the licence, but there is a question as

to whether they should use the canonical URL for the licence, or

point to a ﬁle within the package that contains the full text. The

latter option is legally more robust, but canonical URLs have the

advantage of being easier for automated tools to recognise. If you

do include a copy of the licence with your data, it is customary to

include it in a ﬁle named ‘license’ at the top level of the directory

structure.

1 1

1 0

0 1

1 1

0 1

0 0

1 0

1 1

0 0

Consultative Committee for

Space Data Systems. (2012). Ref-

erence model for an Open Archival

Information System (OAIS). Magenta

Book. Also published as ISO

14721:2012. Retrieved from

http: //public .ccsds .org/

publications/ archive/650x0m2

.pdf.

‘We believe the concept of open

data . . . goes beyond making

data freely accessible. Data

should also be free to distribute,

copy, re-format, and integrate

into new research, without legal

impediments. . . . Therefore,

to eliminate potential legal

impediments to integration

and reuse of data, speciﬁcally,

and to help enable long-term

interoperability of data we

believe an appropriate licence

or waiver speciﬁc to data should

be applied, and made explicit

by the authors and publishers.’

– BioMed Central’s Position

Statement on Open Data (Draft).

(2010, September 2). Retrieved

from BioMed Central Blog website:

http://blogs.biomedcentral

.com/bmcblog/files/2010/09/

opendatastatementdraft.pdf

Where a signed licensing agreement is used instead of an

open-ended licence, it is less critical for data and data packages

to be marked up with licensing information as the licensee’s

data management regime should enforce compliance with the

agreement.

Licensing related information

If released data are to be as useful as possible, they need to be

supported by additional information. A comprehensive set of such

information might include

• details of how the data have been encoded (database

structures, ﬁle formats);

• a list of software known to work with the data and their

supporting information;

• indications of how the data relate to other data assets;

• administrative information (identiﬁers, checksums);

• explanations of what the data represent (e.g. for sensor data,

what the sensor was measuring and in what units);

• the processing history of the data (how they were generated

and subsequently transformed, when and by whom);

• a narrative describing the context (why the data were

generated/collected, what methodology was used and why).

The last three types of information are particularly important

for users as they interpret the data, and determine whether and

how they can be integrated with other data.

If any of this information exists in the form of further datasets,

it should be released under the same licence or dedication as the

main data, unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise. This

helps both parties to avoid confusion, and reduces the likelihood of

data becoming separated from the supporting data on which they

rely.

For information in the form of documents, it is not so critical

to apply a licence, as there are long-established community norms

for citing, quoting from and paraphrasing earlier written works.

Having said that, applying a licence may (depending on the one you

choose) provide users of the data with more ﬂexibility with regards

redistributing your documentation with their derivative datasets,

or quoting substantial portions of your documentation within their

own. If you do license your documentation, choose a licence that

reﬂects how you want it to be used. As this may be quite different

to your intentions for the data, you need not use the same licence

for both.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Margaret Henty (ANDS), Jason Miles-Campbell (JISC

Legal), and Angus Whyte and Lorna Brown (DCC) for helpful

comments.

Further information

Three other DCC guides, each by Mags McGinley,

cover this topic:

Awareness Level: Legal Watch: Creative Commons

licensing

Awareness Level: Legal Watch: IPR in databases

Awareness Level: Legal Watch: Science Commons

Barlas, C. (2006, July). Digital Rights Expression

Languages (DRELs). London: JISC. Retrieved from

http : / / www .webarchive .org .uk / wayback /

archive/20130607115257/http://www .jisc .ac

.uk/whatwedo/services/techwatch/reports/

horizonscanning/hs0603.aspx

Guibault, L. & Wiebe, A. (Eds.). (2013). Safe to be

open: Study on the protection of research data and re-

commendations for access and usage. Universitätsverlag

Göttingen. Retrieved from http://webdoc.sub.gwdg

.de/univerlag/2013/legalstudy.pdf

Harris, L. E. (2009). Licensing digital content: A practical

guide for librarians (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: American

Library Association.

Jasserand, C. (2011). Creative Commons licences and

design: Are the two compatible? JIPITEC, 2, 131–142.

Retrieved from http://nbn-resolving.de/urn :nbn:

de:0009-29-30856

Korn, N. & Oppenheim, C. (2011, June). Licensing open

data: A practical guide. London: HEFCE and JISC. Re-

trieved from http://discovery.ac.uk/files/pdf/

Licensing

Open

Data

Practical

Guide.pdf

Korn, N., Oppenheim, C. & Duncan, C. (2007, May).

IPR and licensing issues in derived data. London: JISC.

Retrieved from http://www .jisc .ac .uk/media/

documents/projects/iprinderiveddatareport

.pdf

Korn, N., Oppenheim, C. & Picciotto, S. (2007, May).

Other types of IPR and their impact on JISC projects. Lon-

don: JISC. Retrieved from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/

media/documents/projects/othertypesofip.pdf

Murray-Rust, P., Neylon, C., Pollock, R. & Wilbanks, J.

(2010, February 19). Panton principles for open data in

science. Retrieved from http://pantonprinciples

.org/

Data Re-Use and Licensing Frameworks. (n.d.). Re-

trieved from Australian National Data Service website:

http://www.ands.org.au/publishing/licensing

.html

WIPO Lex. (n.d.). Retrieved from World Intellectual

Property Organization website: http://www .wipo

.int/wipolex/en/. (Database of national intellectual

property laws and treaties.)

Creative Commons licences. (2009, March). Lon-

don: JISC. Retrieved from http : / / www .jisc

.ac .uk/publications/briefingpapers/2009/

bpcreativecommons.aspx

Diagnostic Tools. (2010). Retrieved from Open Educa-

tional Resources Intellectual Property Rights Support

Project website: http://www .web2rights .com/

OERIPRSupport/diagnostics.html

Starter Pack. (2010). Retrieved from Open Educa-

tional Resources Intellectual Property Rights Support

Project website: http://www .web2rights .com/

OERIPRSupport/starter.html

Pollock, R., Gray, J. et al. (n.d.). Guide to open data

licensing. Retrieved from Open Deﬁnition website:

http://opendefinition.org/guide/data/

Please cite as: Ball, A. (2014). ‘How to License

Research Data’. DCC How-to Guides. Edinburgh:

Digital Curation Centre. Available online:

http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides

Follow the DCC on Twitter: @digitalcuration,

#ukdcc

Revised: 17 July 2014