When you are depositing data in a repository for long-term preservation and sharing, you will be asked to select a licence for your dataset. The process of licensing is an important enabler of the FAIR Principle [1] letter ‘R’: ‘Reusable’. This principle advises that data (and metadata) should be released with a clear and accessible data usage licence, which will maximise the potential for it to be reused in the future. But what is a licence exactly, and what are its implications for your research data?
In this blog post, we explain what a licence is and how it works in relation to research data, outline some of the commonly used licences and discuss challenges when it comes to licensing sensitive data.