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 (only in finnish).
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.
A license is a permit granted by the rights holder for a specific work, database, or other material. The license provides the recipient who accepts it with certain usage rights while also imposing specific conditions on their activities. Commonly used licenses include, for example, Creative Commons or CC licenses. Both research data and research data metadata can be licensed. The license is indicated in connection with the research output or may apply to all material within a specific service.
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
When conducting research, the researcher(s) should always make clear on what conditions the data can be used and possibly to agree on the ownership and right of use to the data. It is important to do this already at the preparation stage of the study, especially from the point of view of the possible research results and data reuse. Before drafting the research agreement, the funder’s requirements on research data should also be checked so that any agreement on the data follows these requirements. Furthermore, it should be checked that the right of use to the background materials used in the study is clear.
In contract research (i.e. all research conducted in projects funded with external funding), an agreement on the transfer of intellectual property rights is appended to the employment contract of the University’s teaching and research personnel, according to which the right to the data is transferred to the University in the extent required by the funder or partner. The Transfer of Rights Agreement is included in the employment contracts of other staff members when they participate in the said externally funded research.
In research conducted with basic funding, the rights to the data primarily remain with the person who collected the data. If researchers from several organisations have participated in the research, the rights to data are owned collectively. Possible owners can be both organisations and private persons. In these cases, the rights to the data are dependent on, for example, the consortium agreement of the research project. Furthermore, the members of the research group, even within the same organisation, should agree among themselves on the right of use to the data.
When a researcher changes organisations, they have to find out and possibly agree on how they can use the data they have collected in the future and what the ownership of the data is.
Also students and grantees who are not in an employment relationship with the University can sign the agreement on the transfer of intellectual property rights which ensures that the data they collect is precisely identified and the University is granted parallel right of use.
The data collection phase of the ongoing research also includes different kinds of agreements and levels of consent from the research participants. When using an outside organisation for information collection or interviews, it has to be defined and agreed who owns the research data or manages it, and how the research participants are informed about the use of the data. At the latest, this should be done when drafting the data collection agreement.
The user rights to archived data is defined individually by each archive. When confidential documents are used in the study, the right of use is defined by the person/organisation providing the material. Online data that is openly available can be used in research, but their archival for further use is not always possible. Also, privacy, ethical and legal questions related to the use of online data should be carefully considered even before the data collection.
When the data is collected directly from the participants, the information given to them significantly defines the right of use to the data. More information on informing the participants is available on the website of the Finnish Social Science Data Archive.
When you start planning a research project, you should check what contractual obligations, property rights, necessary data protection, and intellectual property and utilisation issues will concern the research material you are going to collect, produce, or use in the project. The instructions below are suitable for all types of projects, be it a research project by one researcher, or a collaborative project between several researchers and organisations.
The instructions are also applicable regardless of whether the data produced and processed in the project is experimental, observation-based, simulation-based, pre-existing, or qualitative. Below are intellectual property, contract, and data protection instructions, and contract templates you may need to take into account in your data management. In section 3, there is information on licensing and sharing your research data.
No → No extra steps needed.
Yes → See the instructions in the links below.
No → No extra steps needed.
Yes → Sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement or take the company's confidentiality agreement into account.
In unclear cases, please contact legal@utu.fi.
No → No extra steps needed.
Yes → Sign a Material Transfer Agreement or Research data agreement
No → No extra steps needed.
Yes → Sign a Research Agreement (contract research i.e. commissioned research or jointly financed research). If the contract is signed with a funder, ask for a model contract from the funder. If the funder does not have a model, see further instructions.
No → No extra steps needed.
Yes → Check the tab titled "Personal information and sensitive data", which personal data processing agreements apply to your project.
Please, see also guidance on data protection.
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No → No extra steps needed.
Yes → Go through the university's procurement guidelines.
The University of Turku recommends, to the extent it is possible, that research data should be archived in a general or discipline-specific open access archive or repository for further use. Therefore, the data should be licenced under a Creative Commons licence or equivalent. Creative Commons licences are standard licences used to determine the terms of use of research data.
