Data | Copyrightable Works | Software

Licenses tell users up front about any restrictions or expectations for reuse and resharing of your published materials, and increase the likelihood that other researchers will consider your data for reuse.

Assuming the data can be openly shared*, consider the following as you decide which license to choose:

  • what license(s) does the repository support or provide?
  • what are your preferences regarding reuse, attribution, derivatives, and commercialization?
  • what are the requirements of the research funder, institution, and publisher?

Data

We recommend Creative Commons (CC) licenses for data sharing via Iowa Research Online. Many other repositories also use CC licenses.

Creative Commons provides an overview of CC licenses; please read it before you decide which license to apply to your data.

  • Once a license is chosen and the dataset is published, the license cannot be changed.

CC0 puts no restrictions on what others can do with your data; it puts your work into the worldwide public domain.

The rest of the CC licenses include one or more requirements for users of your data. These are described on the Creative Commons website

  • CC-BY (CC BY 4.0) is a frequent choice for data sharing. It requires others to give you credit if they use your data.

Copyright

For sharing articles and other publications, instructional videos, and other works that would be protected by copyright, we suggest using a Creative Commons license. The CC license chooser can help you select an appropriate license, or contact us if you would like assistance.

Software

Please see our page on Software and Code Licenses.

For more information:

 

*Note: for human subject and other sensitive or restricted access data, research funding agencies may require the use of specific repositories (see NIH, for example). In other cases, a data use agreement may be required in order to share data with someone external to the UI.