Open data licensing

Our definition of ‘open data’ is data that anyone can access, use and share, but importantly, open data must be published under an appropriate open licence for it to be truly open

An open licence is one that places very few restrictions on what anyone can do with the content or data that is being licensed. You can choose to make your content or data available under one of three levels of licence:

• A public domain licence which has no restrictions (technically, you waive your rights to the content or data).

• An attribution licence that says that reusers must give attribution to you.

• An attribution and share-alike licence which says that reusers must give attribution and share any derived content or data under the same licence.

A good licence must be clear on three aspects:

• What the user can do.

• What the user must do.

• What the user cannot do.

There are a number of templates available with standard terms included, for example:

• Creative Commons – templates and standard wording for open and non-open licences for creative content and data.

• Open Data Commons – templates and standard wording for open database licences.

• Community Data License Agreement – Permissive, Version 2.0 - CDLA – an open data agreement from Linux Foundation designed to make it easier to share and collaborate with open data.

For further guidance on data licensing, why not check out our ‘Data licences’ resource list?