Licensing data

In the video, Isabel Chadwick recommended that when researchers share their data, they should choose a license to apply to the data. A license is a set of rules and permissions that tells you how you can use someone else's data. It is like an agreement between the person who created the data (the data owner) and the person who wants to use it (the data user).

A license specifies what you can and cannot do with the data, whether or not you need to give attribution to the data owner, and whether or not you can further share the data. For example, a common open license used for research data is CC BY-NC 4.0 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] which allows the person using your data to share and adapt the data, but only if they give attribution to you, the data owner, and don’t use the data for commercial purposes.

There are other types of license, which allow you to specify different levels of openness. You can choose to give your work over to the public domain, so people can do whatever they like with it. Alternatively, you can choose a type of license which prevents users from adapting your work. You can find out more about licensing by referring to this helpful list on the Creative Commons website.

Activity 1:

Allow about 10 minutes

In this activity, you can test your understanding of the importance of considering anonymity when it comes to data sharing.