The Landscape of Rights and Licensing Initiatives for Data Sharing

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-029

Keywords:

Data Sharing, Licensing, Data sharing agreements, Restricted data, Privacy and data sharing, Rights management

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, a wide variety of resources have been developed to address the rights and licensing problems inherent with contemporary data sharing practices. The landscape of developments is this area is increasingly confusing and difficult to navigate, due to the complexity of intellectual property and ethics issues associated with sharing sensitive data. This paper seeks to address this challenge, examining the landscape and presenting a Version 1.0 directory of resources. A multi-method study was pursued, with an environmental scan examining 20 resources, resulting in three high-level categories: standards, tools, and community initiatives; and a content analysis revealing the subcategories of rights, licensing, metadata & ontologies. A timeline confirms a shift in licensing standardization priorities from open data to more nuanced and technologically robust solutions, over time, to accommodate for more sensitive data types. This paper reports on the research undertaking, and comments on the potential for using license-specific metadata supplements and developing data-centric rights and licensing ontologies.

Author Biographies

Sam Grabus, Metadata Research Center (MRC), College of Computing and Informatics (CCI), Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA

Sam Grabus is a 2nd year Information Science PhD student In Drexel University's College of Computing and Informatics. Her research interests are Knowledge Organization, Metadata & Ontologies, and Topic Relevance. Sam is the lead Research Assistant on the NSF Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub's data sharing project, "A Licensing Model and Ecosystem for Data Sharing." Sam was also a 2017 RDA US Data Share Fellow.

Jane Greenberg, Metadata Research Center (MRC), College of Computing and Informatics (CCI), Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA

Jane Greenberg is the Alice B. Kroeger Professor and Director of the Metadata Research Center (http://cci.drexel.edu/mrc/) at the College of Computing & Informatics, Drexel University. Her research activities focus on automatic metadata generation and standards, knowledge organization systems/ontologies, linked data, data science, and information economics. She serves on the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub steering committee, the Research Data Alliance U.S. leadership committee, and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) advisory board.  She is a principal investigator (PI) for the NSF Spoke initiative, 'A Licensing Model and Ecosystem for Data Sharing.' She is also the lead PI the Metadata Capital Initiative (MetaDataCAPT'L), the Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering (HIVE) linked data project, Leveraging REDCAP Data Assets for ARCUS with Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania (CHOP), and the LEADS-4-NDP data science educational initiative. She is a co-PI for Drexel's NSF Industry/University Collaborative Research Center (NSF-I/UCRC), Center for Visualization and Decision Informatics (CVDI).  Her research has been funded by the NSF, NIH, IMLS, Microsoft Research, GSK, Clarivate, Thompson Reuters, National Library of Medicine, Library of Congress, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, among other organizational and private sponsors.

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Published

2019-07-04

Issue

Vol. 18 (2019)

Section

Research Papers

Categories

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