These were the topics on 10.4. and 11.4. in Frankfurt: Your institution runs a repository and you would like to know what legal issues, problems or obstacles may arise in data management and re-use?
Are you the author of a scientific paper or a dataset and wondering whether and how you should or can license it?
focus on copyright in the fdm
The hands-on workshop on “Legal Status Quo of FAIRagro Partners” on 10 and 11 April in Frankfurt was designed to address these and similar questions: The workshop provided an overview of the legal issues our agrosystem community has to deal with – with a particular focus on the topic of copyright in FDM.
In lively discussions, the participants talked about which metadata on the legal aspects (licences and restrictions on access/visibility) each dataset can contain – and how this metadata can be distributed to data users such as Portal, SciWin, UCs.
Why the focus on copyright?
German copyright law regulates the protection of intellectual property in the form of works. The requirements for a work to be considered a work are defined in the German Copyright Act (UrhG). This is also the basis for deciding whether a data set can be provided with a Creative Commons licence. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to assess in detail which scientific work can be categorised as a work. As a result, many datasets are in practice provided with a CC licence even though they are not protected by copyright.
And so it was…
We received a lot of positive feedback. It was a very interactive workshop with lively participation from the participants. It was worked out that there will now be a survey about the wishes and concerns and the legal understanding of the community. A legal working group was also established, which will deal intensively with the issue of licensing research data outside of copyright law. A further workshop later in the year will deal explicitly with the metadata relating to the legal aspects discussed.
You can read more about copyright in the RDM in our new blog post “Copyright as the final boss”. Enjoy!