Data Re-use and Licensing Frameworks
A fundamental aspiration of the Australian Research Data Commons is that more data is re-usable. One of the essential ingredients of re-usable data is clarity of re-use permissions, terms, and conditions. Prospective re-users need to know exactly what they can do with the data. Those conditions and permissions should be explicit.
Within the Australian context, this information about the permissions and conditions of re-use can be expressed in different kinds of notices, licences, contracts, etc accompanying the data. Not being clear about permission to re-use data can have the same result as forbidding data re-use, because uncertainty can be enough to discourage the potential re-user.
AusGOAL (formerly GILF) is an open licensing framework designed to assist organisations to start by default from the most open licensing arrangements and work back from there as appropriate. ANDS has prepared a Guide to AusGOAL. AusGOAL/ GILF has been successfully used in many Commonwealth and State government agencies (e.g. Geoscience Australia) to move these organisations on to an open access data footing. The AusGOAL framework incorporates Creative Commons licences.
In principle, any kind of clarity around re-use permissions and conditions is useful. ANDS is promoting the use of AusGOAL in the research and innovations sector in order to not "reinvent the wheel" and to ensure licensing harmony within and between these sectors.
A list of software licenses is located on the Open Source Initiative website. ANDS does not enforce any of these, but we encourage Partners to adopt one of the Google recommended licenses (i.e. Apache, Artistic, BSD, GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPL, MIT, MPL, and EPL).
Attaching a licence or re-use notice to data is the last step in a long journey for research organisations. Major stops along the way include drafting organisational policies, establishing data management capabilities and procedures, as well as clarifying the provenance, ownership and custodianship of the organisation's data assets.
ANDS offers a number of services and projects to support research organisations along that journey:
- ANDS AusGOAL Guide
- Support materials on the AusGOAL website
- ANDS Creative Commons and Data Guide
- ANDS Copyright and Data Guide
- Research Data Licensing Working Group for Infrastructure Providers
- University Data Licensing Implementers Group
