Licensing your data

Publishing and sharing data without telling people how they are supposed to use it is not advisable. While this text here is not legal advice, we would still like to point out that it is a good idea to attach a license to your repository. A common way to do this is to provide a file called LICENSE in the root of your repositories, which should contain the full text of the corresponding license. A license we can recommend is the Attribution-ShareAlike Version 4.0 International.

When requesting to publish a repository to receive a DOI, please provide both:

1. A license name and a URL to the original license text in the metadata as described on the Obtaining a DOI page.
2. A LICENSE file with the text of the corresponding license.

When creating a repository, you can select a license from the "Initial Files" section of the creation page. If you would like to add one of the available licenses after creating a repository, you can download the license text from the list below and upload it to the top level (root) of your repository with the name LICENSE:

Data Licenses

The following licenses are appropriate for publishing data:

• Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
• Creative Commons Attributions 4.0
• Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
• Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication

Software Licenses

The following licenses are more appropriate for publishing software (source code):

• Apache License 2.0
• BSD 2-clause License
• BSD 3-clause License
• BSD 4-clause License
• GNU General Public License v1.0
• GNU General Public License v2.0
• GNU General Public License v3.0
• GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
• GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
• MIT License