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Turku University Library

Research Data

Copyright

Copyright comes into effect when a work is created and it crosses the threshold of originality. Copyright includes moral and financial rights. Moral rights include the right to be acknowledged as the creator as well as the respect right (respect of the creation). Financial rights include the manufacture and distribution of copies of the work.

Copyright is regulated by the Copyright Act (8.7.1961/404). The Copyright Council of the Ministry of Education and Culture issues expert opinions on the application of the Copyright Act. 

A scientific publication is always a work under copyright, but research data is not necessarily protected by copyright. When conducting research, it should be noted that the research data sets can include both copyrighted data and data without copyright. Regardless of whether the data is copyrighted or not, the use and storage of the data should be agreed between the researchers at the beginning of the study. If the data used in the research includes data not produced by the researchers (e.g. photographs or poems), the researchers have to make an agreement on its use as well.

Making agreements is central in order to open and reuse data.

Licensing Research Data

The University of Turku recommends that research data is opened for possible reuse. Therefore, the data should be licensed with a Creative Commons licence or some other licence. In Open Science it is recommended to use the Creative Commons CC BY (= Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International = CC BY 4.0) licence.

If you are using third party data in your research, make sure that you can store the data for long-term use if necessary. Try to get a permission/licence that allows the sharing of data. If necessary, make sure that the possible third party data that does not have a licence can be separated from your data so that the entire data does not lose its significance. If the data contains personal information, make sure that the data protection of the research subjects is in order and, preferably, make the data anonymous while conducting the research. More information is available on the University’s data protection intranet pages and in the Handbook of the Finnish Social Science Data Archive.

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