Pratt Guides: Copyright & Fair Use: Data Reuse and Sharing

Data Reuse and Sharing

Although data gathered during research are not protected by intellectual property law, specially built databases for data are.

What Do (and Don’t) Researchers Know About Data Sharing? (from the Copyright Clearance Center)
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) and The International Association of Scientific, Technical, & Medical Publishers (STM) recommend that publishers should not claim intellectual property rights on datasets submitted for publication.
The UK Digital Curation Centre provides guidance on how to license research data.
Cornell University also provides an introduction to intellectual property rights in data management.
The publisher Taylor and Francis introduced new data sharing Policies in 2018 via InfoDocket
Wiley, another publisher, also has a page about Sharing and Citing your Research Data
Sharing data: legal and policy considerations (from DataOne)

Some content from this box has been adapted from the Research Data Management at UF: Sharing & Copyright Guide.

Can I Copyright My Data? (53:42)

Recorded webinar from the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) on December 3, 2014

Graphs, Tables, and Charts

Graphs, tables, and charts are not subject to copyright unless include some 'modicum of creativity' since they are strictly factual. An example of a chart that is subject to copyright due to the creativity involved is the the xkcd Money chart by Randall Munroe, which is licensed it under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

Additional Reading on Data Reuse and Sharing

Carroll MW (2015) Sharing Research Data and Intellectual Property Law: A Primer. PLoS Biol 13(8): e1002235. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002235
Sharing research data by depositing it in connection with a published article or otherwise making data publicly available sometimes raises intellectual property questions in the minds of depositing researchers, their employers, their funders, and other researchers who seek to reuse research data. In this context or in the drafting of data management plans, common questions are (1) what are the legal rights in data; (2) who has these rights; and (3) how does one with these rights use them to share data in a way that permits or encourages productive downstream uses? Leaving to the side privacy and national security laws that regulate sharing certain types of data, this Perspective explains how to work through the general intellectual property and contractual issues for all research data.
Wilkinson, M. D., et al. (2016). "The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship." Scientific Data 3: 160018.
There is an urgent need to improve the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data. A diverse set of stakeholders—representing academia, industry, funding agencies, and scholarly publishers—have come together to design and jointly endorse a concise and measureable set of principles that we refer to as the FAIR Data Principles. The intent is that these may act as a guideline for those wishing to enhance the reusability of their data holdings. Distinct from peer initiatives that focus on the human scholar, the FAIR Principles put specific emphasis on enhancing the ability of machines to automatically find and use the data, in addition to supporting its reuse by individuals. This Comment is the first formal publication of the FAIR Principles, and includes the rationale behind them, and some exemplar implementations in the community.