By choosing a licence for your research data, you indicate what others are allowed to do with them.

A licence is a legal instrument that specifies a set of standard (or customised) terms and conditions under which others can share and reuse a work, such as research data.

Considerations for choosing a licence

When you publish research data, you have to choose a licence. There are a few points to consider to determine which licence to choose:

1. Determine if your data can be published open access, and check if there are restrictions. This knowledge article outlines WUR's data sharing guidelines.
2. Check if your funder has any requirements related to licences.
3. Check which licences the repository you would like to publish with, offers.

Creative Commons licences for open data

Research data is commonly licensed with a Creative Commons (CC) licence. CC licences offer a simple way to share open content with various conditional permissions. CC licences are standard for open data with no access restrictions. Note: simple presentation of factual data is not protected by copyright, and the CC licence does not apply to that part of the data. See this article for more information about which data is protected by copyright.

Restricted access to research data

For research data that needs to be under restricted access due to legitimate reasons, CC licences are not appropriate. Access to these research data could be allowed on request and under specific conditions. For example, by means of a data sharing agreement. Some repositories offer restricted access or the option to add a custom licence. In cases where a data sharing agreement is necessary, please contact the legal officer << add link when there is an article >> of your science group for assistance.  

Research funder and WUR requirements

Some research funders require research data to be published with a specific CC licence. These are usually the most open licences: CC 0 or CC BY licence. Check the data management policy of your funder for licence requirements. These requirements supersede recommendations from WUR.

When there is no funder involved, WUR Library recommends the CC BY licence for research data, because WUR adheres to the motto 'as open as possible, as closed a necessary' and researchers should at least be attributed for their scientific effort. Additionally, attribution is standard good research practice and is part of the principles of research integrity in science.

Licence options with repositories

Repositories vary in the licences they offer. For example, when publishing research data in Dryad, you can only choose CC 0. Zenodo supports multiple licencing options, but by default applies CC BY unless you select otherwise. If you want or are required to use a specific licence, you must ensure that your chosen repository supports this option.

Support

Do you have any questions? Feel free to contact us at data@wur.nl.