The legal status of research data in the Knowledge Exchange partner countries
The central aim of this report is to identify whether Intellectual Property (IP) rights can form any obstacle to sharing publicly funded research data under open access terms. To the extent that such obstacles do indeed exist, the report makes some suggestions as to how these could be resolved. These questions are answered with the vision of Knowledge Exchange (KE) in mind: to ensure that data that are generated by publicly funded research can freely be shared and reused for further scientific research in all the KE partner countries (the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany). Public research funding agencies have an important role to play in ensuring that IP rights pose no obstacles, and they should take a proactive stance in ensuring the open access availability of research data.
