Safe to be Open: OpenAIRE Legal Study has been published!

Safe to be Open: Study on the protection of research data and recommendation for access and usage | Guibault, Lucie; Wiebe, Andreas (Eds) (2013)

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Any e-infrastructure which primarily relies on harvesting external data sources (e.g. repositories) needs to be fully aware of any legal implications for re-use of this knowledge, and further application by 3rd parties. OpenAIRE’s legal study will put forward recommendations as to applicable licenses that appropriately address scientific data in the context of OpenAIRE.

This study addresses the most important legal issues when implementing an open access e-infrastructure for research data. It examines the legal requirements for different kinds of usage of research data in an open access infrastructure, such as OpenAIREplus, which links them to publications. The existing legal framework regarding potentially relevant intellectual property (IP) rights is analysed from the general European perspective as well as from that of selected EU Member States. Various examples and usage scenarios are used to explain the scope of protection of the potentially relevant IP rights. In addition different licence models are analysed in order to identify the licence that is best suited to the aim of open access, especially in the context of the infrastructure of OpenAIREplus. Based on the outcomes of these analyses, some recommendations to the European legislator as well as data- and e-infrastructure providers are given on improving the rights situation in relation to research data.

The legal research team also highlighted the usefulness of the CC licenses to license scientific datasets, in particular the CC0 Public Domain dedication and CC-BY/CC-BY-SA. OpenAIRE endorses the use of the CC-4.0 licenses. The advantages of the recently released CC 4.0 licenses are such that they have the advantage of including the sui generis database rights into the scope of the licensed rights.

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