Sharing - IP and copyright - flexibility and licensing frameworks

Well, it's been a little while since my last (first) post. Feeling pretty guilty, in fact. So much amazing user-generated content coming from the INF206 crew, it's putting me to shame.

So, I've decided to blog about something that is upfront and centre in my work life at the moment - access statements, licensing, and terms and conditions of use of research data.

Part of my current role in the research data management space is about changing hearts and minds around the issues of sharing research data for discovery, access and re-use. One of the key messages is for researchers to consider the implications of poorly managed research data for future research (their own and others). One of the major issues and considerations surrounding research data is intellectual property, and it is often not straightforward.

There are many reasons why research data may not be shared: the confidential nature of the data; potential patent and commercialisation from a research discovery; and, so on. Sometimes it simply comes down to not planning for the future, but instead focusing on the immediacy of the research work at hand. Can't blame researchers for that; research is hard work, can get pretty messy at times, and is generally time-based with a looming deadline. Additionally, researchers are more often than not time poor, under-resourced and over-stressed. Interestingly, many researchers we speak to don't see the potential of their research into the future, and seem amazed that others (even from other disciplines) might find value in their work above and beyond the current project.  So, I have my job cut out for me!

How does this 'not planning' relate to licensing? Well, if a researcher doesn't think about how their research and associated data might be used into the future, and whacks on an indiscriminate licence or simply applies an "all rights reserved" (enacts the Copyright Act) statement to their work, the rights imposed tie everything up and just make access and re-use that more difficult. Of course, (re)users can seek to gain express permissions from the data creator, but this takes time especially if legal folk get involved, and may not in the end provide the expected results.

Creative Commons licenses provide a reasonable level of flexibility. However, they too can be inappropriately applied and impede the sharing process. For example, a data source provider decides to license their data collections under a CC By ND licence (Creative Commons By attribution and no-derivatives); researchers wanting to use these data collections (datasets) can only do so if they do not modify, adapt, transform or build upon the data. This licence may work quite well for a literary work, but for data it is problematic. What researcher would use data that cannot be built upon? After all, what is research about other than to build upon the known to find the unknown? However, there is potentially a get out of gaol card in that an exception exists for "collections" under the "derivatives works" definition in the legal code of the licence, but... (I'm still waiting for some advice on this).

This blog post offers quite a simplistic description of some aspects of the complex business of sharing information, and the importance of considering the implications of copyright and other IP issues up front. I've found both the Creative Commons Australia and AusGOAL websites particularly helpful in relation to licensing frameworks. Another set of licenses have been developed by the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), but unlike CC licenses, these are specifically designed for data in which copyright does not clearly subsist.

"Data sharing should only occur within a framework where data contributors receive appropriate recognition for their work, and where data users understand, in advance, the responsibilities placed upon them when they access and/or use another’s data." Nicely put!

TERN. (2012). TERN Data Licensing. Retrieved from http://www.tern.org.au/datalicence.

I'm likely to bang on about these types of things quite a bit, so apologies in advance.