User licences

What is a licence?

It is a contract in which the author specifies the terms of use of his or her work, The licence allows the author to grant non-exclusive rights of use, while not transferring his or her copyright (CCdigitallaw 2017).

Is research data protected by copyright?

Yes and no.

According to the Copyright Act (LDA), a œwork is protected if three conditions are met : it is a creation of the mind (the fruit of human activity), which has an individual character (a third party performing the same task cannot create a new work) and which is protected by copyright;che cannot create an identical work) and which is expressed in one way or another (which can be perceived by the senses) (CCdigitallaw 2020).

This means that :

• raw or primary scientific data, for example unprocessed data, is not generally protected by copyright.
• processed or enriched data which meet the criteria of intellectual creation, e.g. graphics, data containing text or images created intellectually with a certain individuality, are legally protected by copyright. (Hirschmann 2020)

What should I look out for when distributing content under a licence?

• Only works protected by copyright can be made available under licence.
• Only the author or copyright holder can choose to distribute his or her work under a licence. This means that if a dataset contains protected data for which the rights belong to third parties, their permission must be sought.
• Licenses are irrevocable. Once you have chosen a licence, you cannot change it.

What are Creative Commons licences?

The Creative Commons licences are the most widely used copyright licences in the scientific world because they are compatible with both data and publications, international and relatively easy to understand.

Beware, however, that Creative Commons licences are not suitable for software. For this type of work, other Open Source licences exist.

Why is it important to license data?

Licenses play an essential role in the distribution of scientific knowledge since they encourage its reuse. In this case, licensing a dataset removes legal uncertainties and avoids all-rights renegotiation, which is problematic in the context of open science.

In principle, data repositories allow you to choose the licence that suits you best. Bear in mind that the more open a licence is, the more it encourages the re-use of your data and the new knowledge that might emerge from it, which also gives your research work greater visibility.

What is an open licence?

According to the Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Definition, data is open if it can be freely used, modified and shared by anyone for any purpose. Thus, only the Creative Commons licences CC-BY, CC-BY-SA and CC0 are open licences.

What are the problems with closed non-commercial (NC) and closed-no-modification (ND) licenses?

It is problematic to prohibit modification because it prevents data sets from being combined, enriched with additional data, translated or even corrected for potential errors (The Open Data Institute 2015).

Prohibiting commercial use is problematic because there is no consensus on what constitutes ‘non-commercial use’. For example, some of the following situations may be considered commercial use: public-private partnerships; a company using the data to provide a useful paid service to non-profit organisations; publishing the data on a blog where free hosting is covered by advertising revenue (e.g. WordPress) or publishing the results of data research in a commercial journal (The Open Data Institute 2015).

What are the problems associated with open sharing (SA) and attribution (BY) licences?

Although licences requiring sharing alike and/or attribution are open, they also pose problems in the context of research data.

Share Alike is limiting because copyleft licences (such as CC-BY-SA) are not compatible with other copyleft licences. This situation therefore affects the interoperability of data and increases the problem of licences being incompatible with each other.

As for attribution (BY), this can be problematic because, in the case of data, it can quickly become time-consuming and unmanageable to cite all the authors one by one;This is particularly true if the attribution information is incomplete or, on the contrary, very detailed and restrictive (The Open Data Institute 2015). Furthermore, attribution cannot be made legally binding with the help of a licence if the data is not protected by copyright... and cannot be licensed.

We recommend sharing research data under the CC0 or CC BY licences for the following reasons:

• Most research data is not protected by copyright and is already in the public domain.
• The CC0 licence solves the problem of incompatible licences and enables datasets to be legally interoperable.
• There is a certain logic to putting publicly funded research data in the public domain.
• Open Science is easier to achieve when there are as few restrictions as possible on the re-use of data.

However, not all data can be shared openly. There may be issues relating to privacy, commercial confidentiality, security, sensitive data, etc. that prevent data from being fully opened up. In order to take account of these possible limitations, UNIL therefore recommends an approach of sharing that is ‘as open as possible and as closed as necessary’.

For questions relating to commercial issues, intellectual property or patents, consult the PACTT (Powering Academia-industry Collaborations and Technology Transfer).

DMLawTool is a decision tree tool developed by the Universit&eagrave; della Svizzera italiana in collaboration with the Université de Neuchâtel as part of the P-5 Scientific Information of swissuniversities. The tool was officially launched at the end of March 2021 and is available free of charge to everyone.

DMLawTool guides researchers through the most relevant legal aspects of research data management and offers approaches to possible solutions to copyright and data protection issues.

Further resources are available at these links:

• Explanation of DMLawTool features (video)
• Example of using the DMLawTool (vidéo)
• Filing / Source code