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Data copyright

Information on Research Data Copyright Laws and Creative Common Licenses.

(Research) Data per se are not protected by copyright. A copyright only applies to a “personal intellectual creation” (§ Abs. 2 UrhG) (=criterium individuality). This is not true for data, as data is seen as facts. This means for data, only the structure of it can be protected by copyright (§ 4 UrhG). For example: The initial table with the data is not protected by copyright, but if the researchers invested comprehensive re-structuring of the data (e.g., by adding new derivatives of the data after pre-processing), a copyright hold by the creator is valid. The same is true for metadata. Beholder of the copyright is always the creator, i.e., the researcher. If the dataset was created in collaboration, all collaborators share the same copyright.

Professors are not obligated to share the created datasets with the university as it is implied that the research work of professors are not bound by instructions of the university (“nicht weisungsgebunden”). It is different for students and other scientific staff as their work is usually bound to instructions of the university (“weisungsgebunden”). This means, that the university holds usage rights for datasets specifically created for theses (Bachelor, Master, Dissertation) by students. Third-party funders such as the DFG do not have any usage rights, but expect the researchers to take care of this by themselves. There are no regulations to which extend researchers should share their data but they highly recommend to share as much as possible.

Creative-common licenses

For published datasets, the subsequent use should be regulated by a creative-common license (CC). Those make it easy for other researchers to reuse your datasets without too much restrictions. If you want the maximum dissemination and use of your research, the CC BY license is the way to go. This license allows others to distribute, modify, and adapt your work as long as they name you as the original creator. This applies to both, non-commercial as well as commercial use. To exclude the commercial use case, you can choose the CC BY-NC license instead. There are 5 CC licenses in total, with the CC BY-NC-ND being the most restrictive one, as this one only allows a download and distribution of your original work attached to your name but doesn’t allow any further modification or adaptation.

Creative Commons License Types. From George Washington University Libraries Open Textbooks. Used under a CC-BY 4.0 licence.