Data Licensing Types
The Licenses
Attribution : CC BY
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
Attribution-ShareAlike : CC BY-SA
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.
Attribution-NoDerivs : CC BY-ND
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
Attribution-NonCommercial : CC BY-NC
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike : CC BY-NC-SA
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs : CC BY-NC-ND
This license is the most restrictive of the six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.
Stand-alone Dataset Repositories
Requires free registration to use. Requires a Publishing Charge of $120 up front. Additional
charge for package of files in excess of 20GB. Assigns a DOI to packages. Packages can
contain multiple file types. Minimal metadata required. Text searching of user supplied
metadata.
Dryad
Requires free registration to use. Provides web access to user uploaded datasets, PDFs,
Presentations and videos. Assigns DOI to files of any format. Minimal metadata required
for submission. Text based searching of metadata. Up to 20GB of free space and an
upload limit of 5GB. Suggest a licensing of CC-BY for figures, media, posters, paper
and filesets and CC0 for datasets and metadata (see above for license definitions).
Figshare
Provides web accessible storage for datasets. Collects user supplied metadata and
allows text searches of that metadata. Supplies links to internal or external data archives.
A DOI is provided to datasets that pass Mendeley review. Users select license to publish their data under (see above for license options).
Storage is free at the moment.
Mendeley Data (Elsevier)
A peer-reviewed, open access journal for the descriptions of scientific datasets. Submissions
of descriptions of big or small datasets. Archives the information needed to interpret,
reuse and reproduce data. Provides a way to search for datasets using standard vocabularies
and metadata collected in a standardized way. Supplies links to the repositories where
the data is actually housed. Publication charge of $1675 USD. This gives < 100GB storage at
Figshare. For uploads of more than 100GB additional charges apply. All content-types are
published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY; see above for definition)
Scientific Data (Nature Publishing Group)
Requires free registration to use. Provides web access to user uploaded datasets, PDFs,
Posters, Presentations and Software. Minimal metadata required for submission.
Text based searching. Can restrict access. Provides DOI's to datasets. Can only accept files
< 50GB at a time. Users can have multiple datasets. Users must specify a license for all
publicly available files (see above for license options). Funded by CERN.
Zenodo