FP's Policy on Open data

This page provides information on FP’s policy on Open Data, which came into effect on 1 January 2016, as a result of our public consultation on Open Data, the outcome of which is reported in this article in FP Research Notes.

Legal restrictions and uncertainties surrounding scientific data are a barrier to efficient data sharing and reuse, and ultimately the pace of research. Copyright in particular is problematic for data. It is often unclear if data are protected by copyright, and the law differs greatly internationally. All open access articles published by FP, unless otherwise stated, are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License, CC-BY 4.0. But where copyright does not apply, neither does the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Our Open Data policy aims to clarify the legal (copyright) status of data published in our open access journals and to maximize the potential for reuse of published science, such as data and text mining. For society to gain the full benefit from scientific data, it needs to be available such that it can be reused, scrutinized and built upon with the minimum of barriers – in accordance with the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science. This means enabling reuse of data without needing special permission from its original creators by waiving copyright and related rights in published data. To achieve this, unless otherwise stated in an individual article’s license, data included in FP’s published open access articles are distributed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication waiver. Anyone reusing data published in FP's journals must, wherever possible, cite the source(s) of the data in a derivative work, although this is not a legal requirement. The Creative Commons CC0 waiver applies to data included in the article, its reference list(s) and its additional files.