A Primer for Applying and Interpreting Licenses for Research Data and Code

Abstract

This primer gives data curators an overview of the licenses that are commonly applied to datasets and code, familiarizes them with common requirements in institutional data policies, and makes recommendations for working with researchers who need to apply a license to their research outputs or understand a license applied to data or code they would like to reuse. While copyright issues are highly case-dependent, the introduction to the data copyright landscape and the general principles provided here can help data curators empower researchers to understand the copyright context of their own data.