Data Licensing

Table of contents
  1. What you need to know
  2. Rights Retention Statement
  3. Set of licenses
  4. Statement examples
  5. Reminders

All original works are protected by copyright automatically. Licenses define what other users are permitted to do or not do with your work. Licensing your work is important if you want others to use, distribute, modify or contribute back to your project.

What you need to know

Licences are complicated. However, if you are in doubt, and your work does not contain especially sensitive data, what you should default to is the Creative Commons BY licence. This will ensure that you are properly credited for the use of your work. Note that the licence allows commercial use of your work. If your needs are more specific, or you are simply more curious about licences, please refer to the Set of licenses section.

Rights Retention Statement

When you submit your manuscripts for publication, to preserve your rights over your work, you should also include a Rights Retention Statement (RRS) in the funding acknowledgement of the manuscript, and ideally also the cover letter or notes accompanying the submission. An example of the Rights Retention Statement is as follows

  • For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission

Set of licenses

  • Check your funder requirements (if any)
  • Creative Commons licences for creative works (including research publications and datasets)
  • Open Source licenses for software source code
  • Licences for specific types of work, such as the Open Data Commons licences for databases (mostly based on the Creative Commons licenses)
  • Government open data licences, such as the UK Open Government Licence for public sector materials

Statement examples

  • © 2019 University of Edinburgh. This dataset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
  • [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/

Reminders

  • Any proposed release under a specific license is agreed by all concerned, as once it has been applied it cannot be revoked
  • Clearly mark it: rights statement + license statement
  • Not automatic
  • If the data is packaged informally the rights statement should be at the top level of a directory or in an obvious intro document such as in a readme.txt file
  • Include in on the page from which the data may be downloaded
  • Only license your own work