Today’s data sharing movement continues to be encumbered by the need to protect sensitive and proprietary information, which can make the data sharing process prohibitively difficult. For some researchers, the advantages of data sharing can be outweighed by the risks associated with sharing personally-identifiable information (PII), intellectual property, and other sensitive data types (Fecher, Friesike, & Hebing, 2015). Fortunately, a number of resources have been pursued over the last twenty years, addressing rights and licensing challenges.

As the data sharing movement grows across all sectors, navigating the landscape of rights and licensing resources has become increasingly complicated given the diversity of the resources addressing these challenges. Where is the best place for a researcher or an organization to learn about facilitating the complex process of rights management? Which standardized licenses would be most appropriate for sharing a particular type of data, and which metadata standards and ontologies can help address these needs? The landscape can be complicated for researchers to navigate, due to the varying scopes and impact of the initiatives, as well as the international nature of data sharing and its challenges. This current environment points to a need for frameworks that can help researchers identify the resources best suited for their data sharing needs.

The research presented in this paper addresses this need. The paper reports results from an environmental scan of resources supporting data sharing through their focus on rights and licensing. The emphasis is on resources that are potentially applicable to research data. The work presented was conducted over a six-month period, from August 2017-January 2018. The work was motivated, in part, by current work on the NSF Spoke Initiative, A Licensing Model and Ecosystem for Data Sharing (Metadata Research Center, 2018) (Greenberg et al., 2017), and by research conducted as a Research Data Alliance (RDA US) data share fellow (Grabus & Greenberg, 2018). The following section of this paper presents the background, covering information ethics and legal challenges of data sharing, followed by the research objectives and review the method supporting the environmental scan. Next, the results are presented in two sections: first, the standards, tools, and community initiatives covering rights and licensing are described, and second, a set of visualized results and initiative descriptions are presented as a framework for understanding how these rights and licensing developments have progressed and interrelate. The results are followed by a directory (Version 1.0) of basic initiative information, a contextual discussion of the environmental scan, and the conclusion that highlights key findings and identifies future initiative direction.

The overriding goal of this work is to provide clarity by offering a framework for understanding the landscape of data sharing initiatives at the intersection of rights and licensing. A secondary goal was to present a basis for a directory of initiatives in this area, which will evolve into an online, community-driven resource. These objectives were shaped by engagement in the North East Big Data Innovation Hub (NEBDIH), as well as work taking place within the Research Data Alliance and related communities. The next section of this paper reports on our methods and the steps taken to address these objectives.

The above objectives were pursued by conducting a multi-method approach combining an environmental scan and content analysis. Environmental scan methods are often pursued in marketing to understand the landscape and identify opportunities and threats, and to detect trends (Cooper & Schindler, 2012). Content analysis is a common method guiding the examination of an artifacts, such as a documents, images or collection of resources, and looking for patterns. The method used in the information and data area, draws from Krippendorff (2012). The combined approach, integrating an environmental scan and a content analysis was pursued to allow more thorough investigation of this topic.

The protocol for performing this research involved the following steps:

Environmental scan steps

Content analysis steps

The results of the environmental scan and content analysis are presented below. The initial environmental scan identified 20 initiatives falling into three broad categories: standards, tools, and community initiatives. As reported in Table 1, we identified 11 standards, three tools, and six community initiatives. Table 1 presents the high-level framework, showing how these 20 initiatives fall into the three broad categories.

For the content analysis, each of the initiatives were further classified by the subcategories of rights, licensing, metadata & ontologies, and informational resources. Each initiative was assigned to an average of two sub-categories. Three of the initiatives were classified with one sub-category, 13 had two categories, and three fit into three sub-categories. Table 2 presents the results of dividing the initiatives into subcategories.

Another output of the content analysis is a timeline of when these initiatives started (Figure 1), in order to identify any insights regarding the progression of initiative scope and emphasis over time.

The timeline begins with the development of Creative Commons, ODRL, and RightsDeclarationMD in 2001, and the last initiatives reported in this research are the (Re)usable Data Project, Datasets Licensing Project, The Data Use Ontology, and the FDP Data Transfer and Use Pilot, all of which started in 2017. Beginning with 2008, 16 out of the 20 initiatives (80%) started in the second half of this 16-year time span, with the remaining 4 initiatives (20%) starting between 2001 and 2007. This timeline also shows that the “open” licensing standardization efforts (Creative Commons, Open Data Commons, and The Open Government License) were developed between 2001 and 2009, while the other two licensing initiatives (ShareDB and the Datasets Licensing Project), started far more recently (in 2016 and 2017 respectively), and with substantial technological components. This may suggest a shift in prioritization due to the need for more nuanced solutions.

The initiatives explored in this environmental scan are described more extensively in this directory (Table 3), reporting the following details: name, sub-categories, date initiated, founded by, current URL, followed by the goals and status in the Appendix. The goal of providing these more significant descriptions is to provide readers with a concise glimpse of the scope and purpose for each initiative, as well as what types of data are appropriate for the various standardization efforts and technological infrastructures.

The above data analysis presented broad categories, subcategories, a timeline, and directory (Version 1.0) of initiative efforts. The classification of these initiatives demonstrates the complexity of these various initiatives, since most initiatives address more than one need, and vary in purpose and scope. The results show that we can look at these initiatives both at a top level, in terms of being a standard, tool, or community initiative, and at a more specific level, regarding the multiple ways that many of these initiatives approach the challenges of sharing data. Our top-level classification showed a heavy emphasis on the development of standards and community initiatives, with far fewer tools to facilitate the process. The classification of initiatives into subcategories provided further insights. The vast majority of these initiatives fell into two or more subcategories, demonstrating that the majority of standards, tools, and communities at the intersection of rights and licensing are multi-faceted. As discussed above, the timeline of initiatives demonstrated a shift in licensing standardization priorities, which may suggest that while the open license standardization efforts have been successful in meeting the needs of a particular segment of the data sharing community, there are still too many barriers that prevent researchers from sharing their data, and these data sharing challenges need to be met with more nuanced, robust, and interoperable licensing initiatives that can ensure the protection of more sensitive data types.

This research also produced additional key observations that could inform future research, but will require further analysis. An interesting metadata observation from the environmental scan results is that none of the rights or licensing-related standards and schemas were developed specifically for use with research data. Despite the proliferation of rights-related and licensing metadata schemas, one of the challenges is implementing commerce or library-centric metadata schemas for data-centric data sharing needs. Perhaps the use of multiple metadata formats could be encouraged in order to allow researchers to append their discipline-specific metadata standards with interoperable rights or licensing standards to communicate essential privacy and intellectual property requirements and limitations. The idea is to employ rights or licensing-specific metadata supplements as boundary objects that reach across communities (Star & Griesemer, 1989), facilitating interoperability between disparate data sharing communities within industry, academia, and government.

The two ontologies discovered, however, are specific to research data. The Data Use Ontology was developed specifically the facilitate the sharing of genomics data, which would most likely not be appropriate when sharing other types of research data. The Neurona Data Protection Ontology, while pertinent to data protection and security, is only relevant within the Spanish legal system and European Union data protection guidelines, and thus may not be appropriate for more widespread application. One potential avenue forward to address this gap in research data-specific rights and licensing metadata standards is to develop a generic or cross-discipline ontology or standard for expressing rights and licensing metadata for the purposes of data sharing. By identifying cross-disciplinary rights management and licensing requirements for sharing private and sensitive data types, an information model could be developed to enable the sharing of disparate research data types across multiple domains.

The current landscape of initiatives seeking to address the rights management and licensing complications of data sharing is encouraging, but there are challenges regarding the implementation of these various efforts. For example, there are different applicable standards and policies for data sharing, not just between different disciplines and communities, but also between US-centric and international efforts. Data sharing initiatives in Europe may not be appropriate to meet data sharing needs in the United States, due to the disparate community-specific, local, and national regulations for protecting privacy.

The directory of data sharing initiatives examined in this paper is not exhaustive, and there are undoubtedly many other ongoing efforts to address the rights management and licensing challenges of sharing private and sensitive data types. Identifying all of the initiatives may not be possible, due to the varying progress, publicity, and impact level of initiatives, from local domain-specific repositories, to national or global efforts. Another limitation of this research is that the categories and subcategories used for this environmental scan are subjective in nature, established iteratively by the researchers, and could be categorized in different ways. However, the categories and sub-categories created by the researchers are intended to provide users with a quick glance at the scope and purpose of these rights and licensing efforts. Similarly, an additional challenge is that people from different backgrounds and perspectives within data communities may have varying notions of what qualifies as a standard, tool, or community initiative. For this study, effort was made to follow what seemed to be most consistent for our purposes and within the context of how these topics are generally understood within the RDA community.

The objective of this research was to provide clarity by offering a framework of the landscape of data sharing initiatives at the intersection of rights and licensing, based on the categories and subcategories used. This was accomplished through an environmental scan, which was performed through the collection, categorization, and presentation of results, including the development of a resource directory (Version 1.0). The results demonstrated how these 20 initiatives interrelated and differed, as well as how the trend of rights and licensing efforts have progressed over the last 16 years. Over time, efforts shifted from the development of open licensing standardization initiatives to more nuanced and technologically-focused efforts, which can accommodate for more sensitive and private data types. The directory was developed as a contribution for researchers, as a one-stop resource for understanding what organizations and people developed the initiative, when it was developed, what are the goals and current status, as well as where to find more information. Gathering information for the directory also identified insights and opportunities in the metadata and ontology community, including the need for universal rights and licensing metadata standards and ontologies specifically for use with research data.

As the landscape of data sharing initiatives continues to grow, clear next steps include connecting this resource to the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub’s data sharing spoke initiative, Drexel’s Metadata Research Center, and the Research Data Alliance. We will provide a template to these organizations, for wider and further vetting and contribution to this directory. Additional next steps include further engagement with developing data sharing standards and best practices with the Research Data Alliance global community, as well as promoting the continued development of standards, tools, and communities that specifically promote the sharing of sensitive and private data types. Through the development of these initiatives and solutions, the prohibitively difficult process of sharing data will become easier, which is essential to support scientific research and innovation.

The additional file for this article can be found as follows: