Understanding Research Data Licensing in the Usage Categories

ABSTRACT

Licensing data is critical to promote research data sharing and reuse. There are many standard licenses, customized licenses, terms of use, and use agreements used in practice, which are heterogeneous and hard for data providers to choose. This study used a qualitatively‐driven‐mixed method, including stratified and systematic sampling methods, and Grounded Theory to explore data licensing of the Dataverse repositories. We focused on the data usage and created a list of categories of permitted and restricted data usage. The categories help data providers understand and choose appropriate licenses when sharing data. They also build a foundation for our future work to create a faceted knowledge structure for research data licensing.