License Clearance Tool - Description and Documentation

Intro - Aim & purpose of the tool

This tool is the output for Task T4.4 that aims to mainstream concrete certification standards, tools and mechanisms for open research data management and certification schemes for data repositories, aligning with activities and results of INFRAEOSC-5c. It targets both data intensive RDM (through cloud compute) and the curation and handling of the long tail of science with the aim of establishing consolidated models of RDM activities in the target countries. Building on the work undertaken in T4.2 and T4.3, this task delivers a certification tool for supporting trustworthiness of data repositories and ensuring their FAIRness in a standardised and interoperable fashion, with the objective to support the onboarding of repositories to EOSC.

Newly produced datasets, but mostly the creation of derivative data works, i.e. for purposes like content creation, service delivery or process automation, is often accompanied by legal uncertainty about usage rights and high costs in the clearance of licensing issues. NI4OS-Europe, with the "Data Clearance" tool aims to facilitate and automate the clearance of rights (copyright) for datasets that are to be cleared before they are publicly released under an open licence and/or stored at a publicly trusted FAIR repository. It will additionally allow the crowd-sourced documentation of the clearance process. Main aspects of the tool include:

• Data clearance not bound to the user that initiated the procedure, so it can be started and finished by different users.
• Potentially include crowd-source clearance.
• Clearance metadata will be an open-source resource.
• Provides equivalence, similarity and compatibility between licenses if used in combination, particularly for derivative works.

Related Work

OpenMinted set out to create an open, service-oriented e-Infrastructure for Text and Data Mining (TDM) of scientific and scholarly content. They created the The OpenMinTeD License Compatibility Matrix tool as a service to help users understand whether they can combine together works, software and services available under different licenses or terms of use and determine what they can do with the outcome of their combination. The work done for this tool can be seen as a predecessor to the work currently been done for the NI4OS-Europe Data Clearance Tool at a larger, more complex and business oriented scale.

Targeted use

The intended use of the tool is to provide a guided approach for establishing the proper open-source licence required for the creation of a new (or synthetic) dataset, or for the re-use of an existing unlicensed one. The procedure takes into account many potential data managers (users initiating or completing a data clearance procedure). Potential users may be researchers and research organisations.

Version features

• Initial version provides a proof-of-concept workflow.
• Will initially provide guidance for existing standard open-source licenses only.