This page summarizes some of the content from the internal TU training course Sharing my research output with others: The correct use of licences for data, software and publications *english* which I took in June 2022 as well as some additional Journal specific stuff I researched and found out later.

You can also check out this page about licenses from TU Wien's research data management team.

General

The terms "license" and "copyright" come from the copyright law and are always related to some kind of "work" of one or more authors. The problem is that the law is usually behind real life, especially when it comes to technical advancements. Fortunately, software is already included in the copyright law, but general data is not protected by it. Only if the data is part of some work will the copyright law also apply to it. That's why licensing data is a bit tricky and has to be studied on a case-by-case basis. Nevertheless here are few rules, tips and gotchas I took away from the course.

  • Always add a license if you publish anything. Without a license the authors hold the strictest copyright and nobody can do anything with their work.

  • Once you choose a license you can later only change it to a more open one, but not a more closed one.

  • If your project contains a mix of software and other material, you can include multiple licenses, as long as you are explicit about which license applies to each part of the project.

  • Always check all your contracts (employer, funder, etc.) for terms or conditions on copyright and licensing. The TU Wien, e.g., holds the copyright on all works of its employees. However, since the TU Wien is not a natural person it cannot license anything. This has to be done by its employees.

  • TU Wien employees are not free to choose any license they want for their work. The TU has a say in it (Policy for Research Data Management). Strictly speaking this means that you have to ask the head of your organizational unit or the head of your institute when choosing a license for you work.
    However, in general, the TU Wien supports and encourages the use of open licenses: "In compliance with intellectual property rights, and unless third-party rights, legal requirements, Rectorate decisions, other reasonable interests or property laws prohibit it, research data should be assigned an open use license." Policy for Research Data Management, TU Wien, 2018, Page 3.

  • If students create data as part of a thesis or something, it is recommended to set up a contract that specifies what happens with the data when the student leaves. Otherwise it might be compilcated or impossible to use the data in future research or publications since the student is the data creator and holds all possible rights.
    TODO: Apparently such contracts are already availabe but I can't remember how to get them or whom to ask.

  • For general information about open access (like gold, green, and hybrid open access) and Plan S see https://www.tuwien.at/en/library/research-and-publishing/open-access-and-copyright.

Software

When it comes to open software licenses there are basically two types: permissive and copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses like MIT, Apache 2.0, ... allow you to do basically anything as long as you attribute the original author. Copyleft licenses, like (L)GPL, do not permit commercial use and require derivative works to also use the same license. That's why they are called copyleft or viral.

  • Take a look at https://choosealicense.com/ to choose a license.
  • Check out https://tldrlegal.com/ to lookup popular software licenses summarized at-a-glance.

  • If you use a library under a permissive license than the fact that the library is in your dependency tree is enough to fulfill the attribution requirement of such licenses. For example if you develop something in Python and have a requirements.txt where pip looks up your dependencies and installs them if necessary, then that's sufficient.

Not software

Journals 

Publications with FWF funding (and which paper has none) need to be published under full journal (gold) open access or with arXiv preprint (green) open access. Further a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License is required and needs to be acknowledged in the paper as "For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.".

Publication fees can (only) be paid through the TU library, please fill in the form  https://www.tuwien.at/bibliothek/publizieren/foerderungen/antrag-open-access-foerderung-des-fwf when submitting to PRB or other journals with reasonable high acceptance rate. For high impact journals with lower acceptance rates maybe only do so when the paper is accepted.

arXiv

  • Not really a journal but it took me way too long to find the license under which an article is published there, so I wrote it down here: It is on the top right under the links "PDF" and "Other formats". There is either a link called "license" or a picture of a creative commons license.

SciPost

  • All SciPost content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. That means everything is awesome and Git repositories containing the manuscript as well as compiled PDF articles can be made public as long as the CC BY 4.0 license is added. I would still recommend adding a link to the SciPost article and the DOI.

APS

  • Open access only APS journals such as PRX and PRR can be published with CC BY licence and refunded via the TU library, see above. 
  • For mixed open access and conscription journals such as PRB and PRL, there is a deadlock: FWF requires CC BY → APS requires for CC BY open access → FWF/TU library does not pay for it as they also pay the subscription fee. To publish you need to ask for a special permit in advance from the FWF.
  • You are not allowed to put the final accepted paper after the proofs on arXiv. Best submit it on arXiv simultaneously with your APS submission, and update the final version you send to APS (but without the further editorial changes). Patrick had some email exchange and APS answer, you find the  PDF of it here.
  • For info about open access publishing in APS journals see https://journals.aps.org/authors/apcs. This also includes a price list for article publication charges (APC).
  • https://journals.aps.org/licenses might also be of interest


Elsevier

       Elsevier is a "predatory" publisher, publication in Elsevier journals is strongly discouraged.


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