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.
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 or a Cooperation Agreement. 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.
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.