Choosing a licence for your dataset

A licence tells others how they may use, share, and reuse your published dataset. If your dataset can be made openly available, selecting an appropriate licence helps maximize its visibility and reuse while making the conditions for reuse clear.

Which licence should I choose?

If restrictions do not apply to your dataset, your data can be openly published. Open datasets published in DataverseNL generally have a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons licenses allow you to specify copyright permissions to the general public.

When should I use CC BY 4.0?

To maximize the reuse of your open research data, our advice is to publish research data using the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). This licence allows others to copy, share, adapt, and build upon your data, provided they give appropriate credit. 

Researchers are expected to cite data sources according to the standards for good research practices, regardless of the licence used. Attribution is therefore an important scholarly norm in addition to the legal requirements of a license. 

When should I use CC BY-NC 4.0?

If you informed your participants that there would be no commercial use of their data, you received their consent, and their data has been sufficiently de-identified to be published, we advise you to use the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). 

What about CC0?

Some disciplines encourage publishing data under CC0 1.0, which dedicates the data to the public domain. Although this licence does not legally require attribution, researchers are still expected to acknowledge and cite the dataset in accordance with good research practice.

Research software licences

Research software should generally not be licensed using a Creative Commons licence. Research software requires a software-specific licence (such as MIT, Apache 2.0, or GPL).