Chapter 1: Licensing for Research Data

Intended audience

This guidance is primarily targeted to providers of publicly-disseminated research data and knowledge and to the funders thereof. Many licensing possibilities for a data resource are taken into account; however, in a some cases the point-of-view is focused from one direction, which can reduce the clarity of our curations for the informatics community. In these cases, we may take on the role of a noncommercial academic group that is based in the US and creating an aggregating resource, noting that other entities may have different results in the license commentary.

Why is this important?

The increasing volume and variety of biomedical data have created new opportunities to integrate data for novel analytics and discovery. Despite a number of clinical success stories that rely on data integration (rare disease diagnostics, cancer therapeutic discovery, drug repurposing, etc.), within the academic research community, data reuse is not typically promoted. In fact, data reuse is often considered not innovative in funding proposals, and has even come under attack (the now infamous Research Parasites NEJM article).

The FAIR principles–Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable–represent an optimal set of goals to strive for in our data sharing, but they do little to detail how to actually realize effective data reuse. If we are to foster innovation from our collective data resources, we must look to pioneers in data harmonization for insight into the specific advantages and challenges in data reuse at scale. Current data licensing practices for most public data resources severely hamper reuse of data, especially at scale. Integrative platforms such as the Monarch Initiative, the NCATS Data Translator, the Gabriella Miller Kids First DCC, and the myriad of other cloud data platforms will be able to accelerate scientific progress more effectively if these licensing issues can be resolved. As affilated with these various consortia, Center for Data to Health (CD2H) leadership strives to facilitate the legal use and reuse of increasingly interconnected, derived, and reprocessed data. The community has previously raised this concern in a letter to the NIH.

How reusable are most data resources? In our recently published manuscript, we created a rubric for evaluating the reusability of a data resource from the licensing standpoint. We applied this rubric to over 50 biomedical data and knowledge resources. Custom licenses constituted the largest single class of licenses found in these data resources. This suggests that the resource providers either did not know about standard licenses or felt that the standard licenses did not meet their needs. Moreover, while the majority of custom licenses were restrictive, just over two-thirds of the standard licenses were permissive, leading us to wonder if some needs and intentions are not being met by the existing set of standard permissive licenses. In addition, about 15% of resources had either missing or inconsistent licensing. This ambiguity and lack of clear intent requires clarification and possibly legal counsel.

Putting this all together, a majority of resources would not meet basic criteria for legal frictionless use for downstream data integration and redistribution activities despite the fact that most of these resources are publicly funded, which should mean the content is freely available for reuse by the public.

Takeaways

To receive a perfect reusability score, the following criteria should be met:

A) License is public, discoverable, and standard

B) License requires no further negotiation and its scope is both unambiguous and covers all of the data

C) Data covered by the license are easily accessible

D) License has little or no restrictions on the type of (re)use

E) License has little or no restrictions on who can (re)use the data

The full rubric is available at http://reusabledata.org/criteria.html

Lessons learned:

The hardest data to license (in or out) are often data integrated from multiple sources with missing, heterogeneous, nonstandard, and/or incompatible licenses. The opportunity exists to improve this from the groud up. While the situation will never be perfect, it could be substantially improved with modest effort.

Acknowledgments

ReusableData.org is funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) OT3 TR002019 as part of the Biomedical Data Translator project. The (Re)usable Data Project would like to acknowledge the assistance of many more people than can be listed here. Please visit the about page for the full list.